As a physicist, I'm compelled to note that the SSC was projected to exceed its initial budget by a huge margin, perhaps 300%. If we can't constrain costs, we don't get to have nice things.
The loss of the SSC was a tragedy, but the fact that Congress was willing to allocate $4B for such a project (>$7B in today's dollars) would suggest that there was widespread national support for such a thing. At the time of proposal, that was $18 per person in the United States, ballooning to $54/person as projected. That's one heck of a bake sale.
True, it's sad that it was going to overrun costs. But it was ambitious--imagine how ahead of its time it was if it could have achieved 40TeV 20 years ago.
It's also depressing when you consider what we did decide to spend money on. The cost of air conditioning alone in Iraq was $20B. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/21/air-conditioning-mi... Edit: I'm not suggesting we go to war and not keep our troops air conditioned--it was a necessity given the conditions. I'm suggesting that when such a tiny fractional cost of the war more than the cost of the SSC, maybe our sense of relative costs was warped.
Just to play devil's advocate -- and taking several levels of cynicism as a given -- the energy security of the USA is worth far more than what we ended up spending on the Iraq war.
For all the money that the EU has spent on the LHC, it hasn't really paid off to that extent. Even if you consider "the web" as part of that payoff, it's not the equivalent of guaranteeing every person in the western world stable access to cheap energy.
(I'm not saying I agree with that rationale for our adventures in Iraq, I just don't think it's quite fair to make the comparison you're making. There's more at stake in Iraq than a stable democracy for a small country.)
We could have technologically guaranteed the energy security of the US for a lot less than the budget cost of the Iraq war (which itself ignores the costs of the lost lives and soured diplomatic relations).
For $1 trillion we could have blanketed the deserts with solar arrays, Manhattan Project'd fusion, and developed synthetic fuel technology that would have let us turn grid energy into liquid fuels.
The amount spent was truly mind-boggling, and the opportunity cost hard to grasp.
Maybe, but it's not like people aren't already working on those things. If they were easy problems they would of been solved already. We do actually spend a ton of money on government funded R&D but it's also terribly inefficient in how it's allocated. Grant system is terribly designed. Maybe it reduces corruption but hard to believe the trade-off of not really knowing the people/teams/companies being funded is worth it.
No, I saw that. My point was that, even if you did justify the war by how it provided energy security, there were far cheaper ways to obtain that security.
How is it irrelevant whether research investments would have more efficiently achieved the war's aims? Why would that not validate the comparison between the supercollider and a war for energy security?
Just to play devil's advocate -- and taking several levels of cynicism as a given -- the energy security of the USA is worth far more than what we ended up spending on the Iraq war.
In a lesser known twist there was heavy debate on the SGML working group that documents shuld have embedded links. For various reasons that did not come to pass but it Effectivly pushed back the web by 5 years until HTML showed up. Presumably if DNS has been out just a little bit sooner the web would have taken off much sooner. Though computer cost and limitations may have set slowed adoption.
Go live in Iraq without air conditioning for a year and see how willing you'd be to give it up.
There has to be a balance. Yes, we should invest in sciences. No, we will not convince people to give up things that may not matter in the long run, but matter very much in their day-to-day lives. Honestly, you should have used the defense budget as an example.
There's a science fiction book, Einstein's Bridge, which (MINOR SPOILER) occurs in a universe where the SSC was built.
(MAJOR SPOILER) The SSC allows an intelligence from another universe to invade and destroy Earth. But at the same moment, two scientists are able to travel back in time, where they use their knowledge of the future to interfere in politics and prevent the SSC from being built. That's our timeline. While it's obviously fiction, there's a corner of my brain that almost wishes it was true, because the reality (it was just political posturing) is so much more depressing to me.
It's amusing that when War of the Worlds was written, we were worried about neighboring planets. If telescope technology has improved to the point that we need only worry about other universes, that must be progress! Although the story you describe reminds me a bit of Asimov's The Gods Themselves, so maybe the frontier has been pushed back that far for some time.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4499048/joel-hefley-kill-ssc
If we had been we'd have had 40 TeV almost 2 decades ago.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collide...