The
Large Hadron Collider has finally started operations again. The
largest scientific instruments ever created, the Large Hadron
Collider or LHC is a gigantic 17-mile-long circular underground
tunnel where scientists collide together particles that have been
accelerated to enormous speeds. So far at least 9 billion
dollars have been invested into this machine, and physicists claim
that it is a great success. But the Large Hadron Collider has
actually produced relatively modest results which haven't clearly
justified its costs. The 9 billion dollars spent on the project would
have been better spent on other scientific projects.
What
has the LHC discovered so far? The only really big discovery was the
verification of the existence of the Higgs Boson, a type of particle.
But it seems this isn't an item that can justify the gigantic cost.
Scientists already strongly suspected that the Higgs Boson existed
before the Large Hadron Collider started operating, so the LHC didn't
really discover the Higgs Boson. The LHC merely confirmed that the
Higgs Boson exists, and that it has a particular mass.
While
the Higgs Boson and its related Higgs field are important, it is
unlikely that any great bonanza will be reaped from verifying the
existence and mass of the Higgs Boson. The discovery of the electron
led to the incredibly useful thing called electronics, but it is hard
to imagine any useful new science or technology coming from the
confirmation of the existence of the Higgs Boson. Why not? Because
electrons are stable and abundant in our world, once we understood
them, we could conveniently put them to our use. But the Higgs Boson
only stays around for less than a sextillionth of a second,. It also
requires fantastic amounts of energy to produce a single Higgs Boson.
Give these facts, it seems hard to imagine any practical use that
can be made of the Higgs Boson.
Even
if something doesn't have much practical value, it might be justified
to spend money on it if there is tremendous public interest. But in
the case of the Higgs Boson, there is very little public interest.
When scientists explain the Higgs Boson and the Higgs field that is
related to it, they start getting into abstruse physics that the
average person finds very hard to understand, and has very little
interest in. From the standpoint of the average Joe, the Higgs Boson
is a bore and a snooze.
Despite
hyped-up stories about possible future discoveries, it is not likely
that further runs of the Large Hadron Collider will produce much in
the way of either practical discoveries or discoveries that the
average person has much interest in. So it is easy to imagine science
projects that would have been a better use of the 9 billion dollars
used by the LHC. For example, the 9 billion dollars could have been
spent on practical medical research that might have saved many lives
and reduced much human suffering.
Another
alternate use of the 9 billion dollars would have been to fully fund
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). When people
talk about SETI, they are mainly talking about the construction and
maintenance of large radio antennae designed to pick up radio signals
transmitted by civilizations on other planets. Such projects have so
far only been given funding of roughly a thousandth of the cost of
the Large Hadron Collider. Making a full-scale effort at SETI would
probably require several billion dollars. Such dollars have never
been spent, partially because projects like the LHC are sucking up
our science dollars.
A
project such as SETI might produce results vastly more interesting
than the results of the Large Hadron Collider. The average person
devotes perhaps 10 minutes a year to reading about the results from
the LHC. But if SETI were to succeed, and we were to start picking up
radio signals from another civilization, it might be an entirely
different matter. The results could easily include photos of some
other planet which might be vastly more advanced than ours, photos
which can be transmitted over radio wavelengths (yes, is it possible
to transmit photos by radio, given a simple coding system in which
particular radio blips stand for particular pixels). The results
might even include television programs that originated on another
planet. Such things would be an endless source of fascination that
the average person might scan for hundreds of hours each year. If we
had fully funded SETI, we might now be seeing headlines like the
imaginary headline below.
We
can also imagine the practical benefits that might accrue from
picking up radio signals from extraterrestrials. Such benefits might
be unlimited, since receiving radio signals from a civilization
vastly more advanced than ours might allow us to improve our
technology in thousands of different ways. But rather than fully
funding a SETI project that might produce the greatest practical
results combined with results of the greatest public interest, the
decision was made instead to fund the Large Hadron Collider project,
which has given us very little in the way of practical results, and
results which are not of much interest to the general public. Why?
I
can think of two reasons that may help explain it. One is the inflated
authority that physicists have in our society, authority that may be
excessive considering how many physicists these days are
concentrating on cherished ethereal theories that haven't passed
observational tests. Given such authority, people are reluctant to
say no to physicists with billion-dollar wish lists. Another reason
is our unreasonable tendency to shun ideas or projects that may be
associated with the paranormal. Whenever large-scale funding for SETI
is proposed, many will pull out their paranormal phobias, and start
trying to use ridicule that includes comments about “little green
men.” The same paranormal phobias that have inhibited discoveries
about our own minds may be keeping us from making discoveries about
minds very different from ours.
Postscript: By this post I don't mean to suggest that I am "anti-LHC," but merely that I think a full-scale SETI program would have been a better use of funds. I certainly appreciate the great work scientists are doing on the Large Hadron Collider, and I am very interested in the results it has achieved. I simply think that a full-scale SETI project might have produced results of much greater interest.
Postscript: By this post I don't mean to suggest that I am "anti-LHC," but merely that I think a full-scale SETI program would have been a better use of funds. I certainly appreciate the great work scientists are doing on the Large Hadron Collider, and I am very interested in the results it has achieved. I simply think that a full-scale SETI project might have produced results of much greater interest.
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