The value of pure research
NASA has an interesting article up about why they’re sending a lander to the moon. What they are not answering– what they are not prepared to answer– is why we bother going to the moon at all.
At the same time, there’s this great video about the CERN super collider. Seriously, watch it. The rest of this post will be here when you’re done…
The video tells us what we hope to learn from the Large Hadron Collider, but not why we care about learning it. Why on Earth should we spend billions to learn these things?
What most people don’t know is that CERN brought us the Web. We spent billions to smash atoms and, the scientists– almost incidentally– put together a bit of technology which defines modern human interactions.
We spend billions on research and received trillions in return. Not bad. Not bad at all…
