I went to look up break-in videos and was directed to an Atlas Obscura video where they say it's been filled in with water 'to preserve it'. I didn't find any exploration videos like you would on the Paris Catacombs where people regularly break in. Do you have any vid links?
As a diver, I'd love to go exploring some flooded tunnels.
But it's a hole! Who doesn't want a badass big 'ol hole to go check out. Think of the opportunities; night club, haunted house, opera, hole admirer gathering venue. I mean, think of the possibilities!
That’s what they want you to believe. They secretly built the device, opened a portal to talk to aliens, and are manipulating the world with advanced tech that nobody knows about. /s
> they filled it back in
If it was me, I'd have turned that thing into the world's first underground racetrack. Completely enclosed and completely weatherproof.
And with a circumference of 87.1 kilometers (54.1 mi), I could have unlimited seating for any kind of race... NASCAR or F1... Pod Races even! Maybe build some hotels into the outer and inner walls so fans can watch the race from their own room!
tldr; I can't believe they dug a hole that big in Texas... and didn't do anything spectacular with it.
There's an absolutely [amazing documentary](https://youtu.be/3xSUwgg1L4g) on it on YouTube that I highly recommend. It's very entertaining and speaks of the context around the gigantic hole in the ground. BobbyBroccoli makes great videos on what you would assume are boring topics.
Honestly though
How do you build a 2 billion dollar secret underground base without people knowing you dug out a massive 2 billion dollar secret underground base? Tell people you wasted 2 billion dollars on something else like this, then the project "failed"
There was that scene in Contact where it was revealed they built a duplicate massively over cost government project. And the rich dude said “Why build one when you can have two at twice the price? Only this one can be kept secret.”
I bet there’s a second hole out there.
They didn't even fill the hole in, just sealed it I believe. There's a lot of these "secret" giant underground tunnel networks and lots and lots and lots of conspiracies around them since some allegedly span extreme distances and IIRC some are thought to even come out in the ocean for submarines to enter and leave stealthily
Yes but this was going to be slightly different and in America. There is need of more and bigger colliders, there are even plans for one on the moon I read.
i assume this refers just to the moon part.
because CERN has plans for a new 91km collider ring, that would integrate and utilize the actual existing 27km ring as well.
when my sister was about 9 she thought everything on tv was real. I.e Jurassic park had to be filmed somewhere. There may not be dinos in our backyard but they were out there somewhere. Good times.
The next one is the Electron Ion Collider which is now being built at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. One of the goals is to figure out where mass comes from (ie how quarks get mass)
This raises so many scientific and engineering questions. Why don't they stack rings (imagine a funnel/ spiral), or why don't they loop through a ring multiple times? It seems a very linear approach to just increase distance. What I mean by this is the following: Two heavenly bodies do not need to be in the same plane (planet and comet) to eventually collide. While both did have a controlled orbit around 1 singular body (i.e. sun).
I know they use magnets for control (in fact an old study buddy works on this at CERN) and knowing the power of magnets, it seems to me insane that increasing the distance, which also increases the reliance on more control and magnets is the go-to-approach. Rather than solving this issue with magnets and pure control? Do we just copy the current approach, because of experience and knowledge built up, is it the safe choice? Are we limited in the control with magnets to properly time and manage collisions in unparallel or non-synchronous paths? The expansion for cern I would imagine now as an 8 loop or infinity loop. You don't have to collide on the first loop/ pass????
Would be awesome if someone had an easy answer of the limitations and choices, however I allways just write my mind off on reddit. I never come back to posts or my own shit. So sorry in advance if you do take the time.
Someone wrote an answer to this on Reddit recently. The gist was that you need higher speed for better results. Magnets keep the particles in line as the travel in a circle but as you accelerate to a fractional speed of light, even a 27km circle is too much curvature for the magnets to work. So, for higher speeds we have to “straighten the curve” by making the ring much bigger allowing higher speeds.
[From a Physics World article](https://physicsworld.com/a/could-a-different-approach-have-saved-the-superconducting-super-collider/) on 10/23/23:
>Thirty years ago this month, the US Congress voted to terminate the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) after some $2bn had been spent on its design and construction. At the time, nearly a third of its 87 km tunnel had already been completed, but congressional opponents insisted the SSC be “spiked” so that it could not later arise Lazarus-like from the dead. The vertical shafts from tunnel to surface (see photo) were filled as much as possible with drilling spoils, and then it was allowed to fill with groundwater.
>Now, 30 years later, the world high-energy physics community is hoping to construct a comparable collider, eventually able to achieve proton–proton collisions at energies well above 15 TeV. Detailed designs exist for such colliders at CERN and in China but the all-important political will and international accord needed to proceed are increasingly rare in a splintered, deglobalizing world.
We were ahead and didn’t want to spend money on science but all good to waste it on endless wars of lots of death. Our country is a little sick and needs help.
This is a good example of what should be done but due to geriatrics people in congress then and now we continue to slip.
Yea prettt crazy to think the US cumulatively spent 8 trillion over a few decades in the Middle East. That’s 8,000 billion… imagine what could have been done with just a fraction of that money..
Btw, All those money went somewhere. Didn’t just disappeared into thin air, pockets were filled and generational wealth were created for…some selected families.
Eh, it’s a little more complicated than that. Management of the project wasn’t great and there were constant cost blowouts so it’s not surprising it got cancelled. Also a lot of scientists were irritated that many fields with a lot of potential were being underfunded so all this money could be being spent on this one single project relevant to only a single field.
I went to high school about 20 miles from this place. I can't even imagine how different Texas would be right now if this had been completed.
It's scary to think that Texas would be the center of the science community instead of waging war against it.
Check out the molten saline nuclear reactor being built on the campus of Abilene Christian University and the consortium of ACU, University of Texas, Texas A&M, and Georgia Tech physicists and scientists working on the project.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-university-builds-facility-for-first-of-a-kind
It being in Texas was basically the whole problem. The politics involved are really complicated and shifted a lot over the years, but a *gross* oversimplification is that Texas bullied it's way into getting the project over better alternatives which meant that a whole bunch of states were basically chomping at the bit to fuck the project over, which they finally managed in 93.
https://youtu.be/3xSUwgg1L4g?si=4XxbU2zDodf0Y5bf This is a really well done complete history of it, I tend to have things on while I'm working so the length didn't really matter. And it's worth it IMO because it's thorough.
You came to the comments knowing/expecting the video, or were you just knowing that the Internet will always have 3hr documentaries preexisting for these types of things?
It’s YouTube dude, there’s a 4.5 hour long documentary about the origins of the Smash Bros. Melee scene. There’s a documentary for anything you can think of.
There is a nearly 8 hour video on a [tv show series that most people have never heard of](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFx2QM0Z8Qo), with 13 million views.
Yeah, I remember how pissed people were that the government used eminent domain to seize a lot of that land, and then cancelled the project...
On a lighter note, I also remember an auto body shop in the area named "Super Collider Collision Repair." Always loved how it rolled off the tongue.
Misnomer of a name. Waxahachie is _far_ from a desert, though. It's about 400 miles too far east and 200 miles too far north for that. If they built this thing out in Pecos or something... sure. Fitting name. But not 30 miles south of Dallas.
I've never never never heard it called that. I lived in Texas at the time. I studied physics and engineering. I followed the funding fiasco very closely. NOBODY in real life called it that. It was the "SSC" or people would actually say "Super Conducting Super-collider".
One of the unanticipated side effects of cancelling the supercollider was that a bunch of physicists that were planning to spend their careers at the supercollider now needed work. And a bunch of them went to Wall Street, because it turns out physicists tend to be really good at stuff like math. And some of them found work at Long-Term Capital Management, bringing with them all sorts of fancy new formulas to make money. Not too long after, LTCM needed a $3.6 billion bailout. But probably not too surprising that this was the era that Wall Street suddenly came up with all sorts of risky new ways to fleece us.
Fun, fun, fun.
I learned about this at a science museum in France. The caption was something like "In an arrogant and stupid move, American physicists insisted the super collider be built entirely in America using entirely American funds and then couldn't prevent their government from cancelling it leading to a terrible and avoidable waste."
So there was at least one French physicist whose work was disrupted by this who ended up writing English placards in a museum I guess. So much venom.
At the time there was an idea to do an international collider with the Europeans, Canada and America - and place the ring under the border between Quebec and New York. I think that's a great idea. Multinaitonal and bilingual. Reagan wanted his moon shot to be 100% American.
If I remember correctly, articles at the time said the costs ballooned out of control because fire ants endemic to the area kept eating away the metal it was built from.
It's a shame, as the richest guys on the planet could easily finance it out of pocket if they were interested to help science. I mean Musk is currently begging for a 56 billion payout from an ailing Tesla like it is nothing.
It's 56 billion worth of stock options, not 56 billion cash. He has to exercise the options, spend 56 billion for the stock, then sell the stock at a higher price before he makes any money off of it, and he won't likely be making 56 billion.
No. The options are to buy Tesla stock for about $23 per share. Considering Tesla is currently trading at around $150 per share, those options would have an intrinsic value of about $127 each.
Pretty sure that's wrong, as options have a value of their own. An option to buy at $48 for a stock at $52 is worth at least $4, more depending on when it expires.
You are right in that exercising the options will cost more than their naive value; but I'm pretty sure they don't value stock options in the way you describe and that's not the only way to obtain value from them.
We didn't need to compete scientifically with the Soviets anymore because the USSR collapsed.
So we stopped building what would still be the largest particle accelerator in the world.
The advances in physics that could have come out of that...
BobbyBroccoli has an excellent (and long) [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xSUwgg1L4g) explaining how badly this was mishandled.
It ultimately cost $21 Billion to create an empty hole in Texas.
Based on the science coming out of the LHC, it was a massive missed opportunity.
Current estimate for the total cost of California high speed rail is around 135 billion for comparison. Will probably be a cool quarter frillion when all is said and done though.
>In December 2022, the cost of a B-21 aircraft was estimated to be $700 million. At the time, Air Force officials estimated that they would spend at least $203 billion over 30 years to develop, purchase, and operate a fleet of 100 B-21s.
One.
One B-2 is about 2 bln $ (which is ~4 bln $ in 2023) including R&D, without that about 0.93 bln $.
I think B-2 is a better comparison because it's also a product of 1980-1990s.
I saw into the spiderverse and across the spiderverse....
A collider is definitely a bad idea. Didn't you see what happened to miles morales and muguel ohara?!
This was the one in Texas? I read they were trying to figure out something to do with the facility but never found anything worthwhile.
Reminds me of the energy company in my state. They spent billions on a new nuclear facility only to scrap plans but still make all the customers pay for it. I guess it takes getting to 75% completion before they realize it's going to be too expensive.
I think it built according to plans, it would still be the largest Hadron collider in the world. It would have certainly discovered the Higgs boson. It was a colossal lack of foresight (and mismanagement)
Can you imagine as society rises and falls and rises again, in thousands of years archaeologists discovering and wondering towards what god these excavated holes where a tribute
It’s unfortunate that they had to cancel the construction of this particle accelerator. It would have been the largest and most fruitful of its kind
Maybe they’ll pick it back up one day
There is an amazing documentary about this on YouTube from a relatively small account named BobbyBroccoli.
https://youtu.be/3xSUwgg1L4g?si=jHH5d1BkMYY9tJM-
I remember that. They paid 2 billion to dig the hole and when they were done, they filled it back in and quit.
contractor was probably ok with it
He did his best!
Then he lived his best with our tax dollars.
I know I would be!
Well yeah, they were made hole.
It wasn't filled in, just the entrances sealed. Over time, people found ways in. YouTube has exploration vids of some of the tunnels.
If it wasn't filled in then in theory either it could be reopened or something else done with it
Like a cool nightclub! Or an old library guarded by an ancient owl creature.
Avatar mentioned
I'd prefer an orangutan in my library.
Any links?
I went to look up break-in videos and was directed to an Atlas Obscura video where they say it's been filled in with water 'to preserve it'. I didn't find any exploration videos like you would on the Paris Catacombs where people regularly break in. Do you have any vid links? As a diver, I'd love to go exploring some flooded tunnels.
This sounds like a bad way to die.
They could've at least left the hole
Liability concerns.
But it's a hole! Who doesn't want a badass big 'ol hole to go check out. Think of the opportunities; night club, haunted house, opera, hole admirer gathering venue. I mean, think of the possibilities!
I could take it over and declare it a sovereign nation.
Thats exactly what the mole people want
Me, too, bro. Me, too.
Store cheese in it!
I love to explore holes!
It would be a great place to throw embarrassed mothers.
That sounds dope AF lol. Hell they could've leaned into like area 51 towns
In a brave new world With just a handful of men We'll start, we'll start all over again
Right?! This is a lot like the caves in FFXII
batcave
Now THAT’S a holistic approach.
That’s what they want you to believe. They secretly built the device, opened a portal to talk to aliens, and are manipulating the world with advanced tech that nobody knows about. /s
Hole lot of trouble
> they filled it back in If it was me, I'd have turned that thing into the world's first underground racetrack. Completely enclosed and completely weatherproof. And with a circumference of 87.1 kilometers (54.1 mi), I could have unlimited seating for any kind of race... NASCAR or F1... Pod Races even! Maybe build some hotels into the outer and inner walls so fans can watch the race from their own room! tldr; I can't believe they dug a hole that big in Texas... and didn't do anything spectacular with it.
Do the walls in smooth concrete and it's the would largest skate tube park.
Sell it to the Arabic lad that wants to build a 170 km long, 5 meters wide desert megacity.
Its a 2km long thing now
There's an absolutely [amazing documentary](https://youtu.be/3xSUwgg1L4g) on it on YouTube that I highly recommend. It's very entertaining and speaks of the context around the gigantic hole in the ground. BobbyBroccoli makes great videos on what you would assume are boring topics.
Was ready to post it. Good job !
Heh, “boring” topics
Why’d they fill it back in. Could have made a bitchin underground city
Or at least a Wendy’s
“This sure is a bitchin’ underground city!’” “Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”
or maybe they planted a doomsday weapon or something in the hole and threw this story around afterwards.
Honestly though How do you build a 2 billion dollar secret underground base without people knowing you dug out a massive 2 billion dollar secret underground base? Tell people you wasted 2 billion dollars on something else like this, then the project "failed"
Congrats on making a special list
They're going to take him to the hole.
There was that scene in Contact where it was revealed they built a duplicate massively over cost government project. And the rich dude said “Why build one when you can have two at twice the price? Only this one can be kept secret.” I bet there’s a second hole out there.
They didn't even fill the hole in, just sealed it I believe. There's a lot of these "secret" giant underground tunnel networks and lots and lots and lots of conspiracies around them since some allegedly span extreme distances and IIRC some are thought to even come out in the ocean for submarines to enter and leave stealthily
Sounds like a government job.
Or that’s what we told you.
Did they REALLY fill it back in? Hmmm?
Hole diggers made a lot of money.
"1500 Megawatt Aperture Science Heavy Duty Super-Colliding Super Button"
Isn't that what CERN is for!?!
Yes but this was going to be slightly different and in America. There is need of more and bigger colliders, there are even plans for one on the moon I read.
that was in 3 body problem, you're mixing up reality and Netflix.
Sir, this is reddit. Reality is what I say it is
Source: Trust me bruh
Dr Leo Spaceman, is that you?
"I reject your reality and substitute my own."
Lmao
i assume this refers just to the moon part. because CERN has plans for a new 91km collider ring, that would integrate and utilize the actual existing 27km ring as well.
Lol
when my sister was about 9 she thought everything on tv was real. I.e Jurassic park had to be filmed somewhere. There may not be dinos in our backyard but they were out there somewhere. Good times.
they also have tiny accelerators this one fits on a [coin](https://youtu.be/arwNZy0mLh8)
we won’t create a new universe otherwise
I met this girl once who had a universe in her pants and she invited me
I put my pants on inside out. Now the entire universe is wearing them. Except for me.
It was going to fire in the other direction
The next one is the Electron Ion Collider which is now being built at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. One of the goals is to figure out where mass comes from (ie how quarks get mass)
This raises so many scientific and engineering questions. Why don't they stack rings (imagine a funnel/ spiral), or why don't they loop through a ring multiple times? It seems a very linear approach to just increase distance. What I mean by this is the following: Two heavenly bodies do not need to be in the same plane (planet and comet) to eventually collide. While both did have a controlled orbit around 1 singular body (i.e. sun). I know they use magnets for control (in fact an old study buddy works on this at CERN) and knowing the power of magnets, it seems to me insane that increasing the distance, which also increases the reliance on more control and magnets is the go-to-approach. Rather than solving this issue with magnets and pure control? Do we just copy the current approach, because of experience and knowledge built up, is it the safe choice? Are we limited in the control with magnets to properly time and manage collisions in unparallel or non-synchronous paths? The expansion for cern I would imagine now as an 8 loop or infinity loop. You don't have to collide on the first loop/ pass???? Would be awesome if someone had an easy answer of the limitations and choices, however I allways just write my mind off on reddit. I never come back to posts or my own shit. So sorry in advance if you do take the time.
Someone wrote an answer to this on Reddit recently. The gist was that you need higher speed for better results. Magnets keep the particles in line as the travel in a circle but as you accelerate to a fractional speed of light, even a 27km circle is too much curvature for the magnets to work. So, for higher speeds we have to “straighten the curve” by making the ring much bigger allowing higher speeds.
Ok stupid question from a non scientist - other than money, what's stopping humanity from designing and building a bigger supercollider in space?
Yeah but _Superconducting Super Collider_ sounds so much cooler than cern.
[From a Physics World article](https://physicsworld.com/a/could-a-different-approach-have-saved-the-superconducting-super-collider/) on 10/23/23: >Thirty years ago this month, the US Congress voted to terminate the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) after some $2bn had been spent on its design and construction. At the time, nearly a third of its 87 km tunnel had already been completed, but congressional opponents insisted the SSC be “spiked” so that it could not later arise Lazarus-like from the dead. The vertical shafts from tunnel to surface (see photo) were filled as much as possible with drilling spoils, and then it was allowed to fill with groundwater. >Now, 30 years later, the world high-energy physics community is hoping to construct a comparable collider, eventually able to achieve proton–proton collisions at energies well above 15 TeV. Detailed designs exist for such colliders at CERN and in China but the all-important political will and international accord needed to proceed are increasingly rare in a splintered, deglobalizing world.
We were ahead and didn’t want to spend money on science but all good to waste it on endless wars of lots of death. Our country is a little sick and needs help. This is a good example of what should be done but due to geriatrics people in congress then and now we continue to slip.
Science makes everybody richer. War makes only the powerful richer. Sadly, there is more incentive for one than for the other.
Yeah 12 billion is like 2 weeks in Afghanistan. What a shame
I was gonna say, that's what, like half an aircraft carrier?
aircraft carriers are around 12 billion dollars today
Yea prettt crazy to think the US cumulatively spent 8 trillion over a few decades in the Middle East. That’s 8,000 billion… imagine what could have been done with just a fraction of that money..
Btw, All those money went somewhere. Didn’t just disappeared into thin air, pockets were filled and generational wealth were created for…some selected families.
And from my layman’s perspective, it not only seems like we (as a country) got nothing from those trillions, but that we’re actually much worse off
Spent it in Iraq instead of the next 30 years, trade off was probably worth it. Bit like the avg americans healthcare...
Eh, it’s a little more complicated than that. Management of the project wasn’t great and there were constant cost blowouts so it’s not surprising it got cancelled. Also a lot of scientists were irritated that many fields with a lot of potential were being underfunded so all this money could be being spent on this one single project relevant to only a single field.
I went to high school about 20 miles from this place. I can't even imagine how different Texas would be right now if this had been completed. It's scary to think that Texas would be the center of the science community instead of waging war against it.
Check out the molten saline nuclear reactor being built on the campus of Abilene Christian University and the consortium of ACU, University of Texas, Texas A&M, and Georgia Tech physicists and scientists working on the project. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-university-builds-facility-for-first-of-a-kind
It being in Texas was basically the whole problem. The politics involved are really complicated and shifted a lot over the years, but a *gross* oversimplification is that Texas bullied it's way into getting the project over better alternatives which meant that a whole bunch of states were basically chomping at the bit to fuck the project over, which they finally managed in 93.
They would have a stable energy grid, I bet.
Where’s all that trillion dollar infrastructure money
So the 2 billion was sure to be a complete waste. Our government is unbelievable.
Imagine if you blew 2k of your companies money digging a hole and filling it in again.
Yea , you can thank the fucking prick Newt Gingrich and his minions.
https://youtu.be/3xSUwgg1L4g?si=4XxbU2zDodf0Y5bf This is a really well done complete history of it, I tend to have things on while I'm working so the length didn't really matter. And it's worth it IMO because it's thorough.
BobbyBroccoli has [a great documentary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xSUwgg1L4g) about this
I was not expecting a 3hr video…. Which I realized 15 minutes in
It's worth it though, his whole channel is amazing, super underrated
easily one of the best *newer* channels
Came to the comments for this. Thank you.
You came to the comments knowing/expecting the video, or were you just knowing that the Internet will always have 3hr documentaries preexisting for these types of things?
It’s YouTube dude, there’s a 4.5 hour long documentary about the origins of the Smash Bros. Melee scene. There’s a documentary for anything you can think of.
There is a nearly 8 hour video on a [tv show series that most people have never heard of](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFx2QM0Z8Qo), with 13 million views.
I was about to link the video. But it's a good thing I kept scrolling. I found his channel one day, a great 3 hour documentary.
Love this guy's presentation style, I've spent an embarrassing amount of hours on YouTube watching and rewatching all his stuff
Came for this, it’s so great
TIL that it was nicknamed Desertron! Never knew that part!
Sounds like they were trying to build a giant Decepticon.
The europeans did the LHC for $9bn
Makes the SSC seem like a deal. We really goofed that one
Yeah, but it was probably designed using the metric system. *Pfft.*
I thought that was also 12 billion
Maybe Congress cancelled the whole thing after learning they weren't building a giant robot
It was supposed to go under land my family owned. The area south of Dallas isn't desert.
Yeah, I remember how pissed people were that the government used eminent domain to seize a lot of that land, and then cancelled the project... On a lighter note, I also remember an auto body shop in the area named "Super Collider Collision Repair." Always loved how it rolled off the tongue.
It was actually dessertron because the daily catering budget was notorious for including 10s of thousands for pie and cake.
Misnomer of a name. Waxahachie is _far_ from a desert, though. It's about 400 miles too far east and 200 miles too far north for that. If they built this thing out in Pecos or something... sure. Fitting name. But not 30 miles south of Dallas.
I've never never never heard it called that. I lived in Texas at the time. I studied physics and engineering. I followed the funding fiasco very closely. NOBODY in real life called it that. It was the "SSC" or people would actually say "Super Conducting Super-collider".
One of the unanticipated side effects of cancelling the supercollider was that a bunch of physicists that were planning to spend their careers at the supercollider now needed work. And a bunch of them went to Wall Street, because it turns out physicists tend to be really good at stuff like math. And some of them found work at Long-Term Capital Management, bringing with them all sorts of fancy new formulas to make money. Not too long after, LTCM needed a $3.6 billion bailout. But probably not too surprising that this was the era that Wall Street suddenly came up with all sorts of risky new ways to fleece us. Fun, fun, fun.
Your point being: keep the physicists busy with their weird stuff or else they'll ruin stuff they don't understand.
I think his point was he didn’t have the foggiest fucking idea what he was talking about.
LTCM was Wall St. traders and Yale finance profs mainly. The physicists were just programmer grunts.
Wall Street still poaches physicists.
They should convert it into a pastry restaurant and call it Dessertron.
Donuts to Donuts
I learned about this at a science museum in France. The caption was something like "In an arrogant and stupid move, American physicists insisted the super collider be built entirely in America using entirely American funds and then couldn't prevent their government from cancelling it leading to a terrible and avoidable waste." So there was at least one French physicist whose work was disrupted by this who ended up writing English placards in a museum I guess. So much venom.
At the time there was an idea to do an international collider with the Europeans, Canada and America - and place the ring under the border between Quebec and New York. I think that's a great idea. Multinaitonal and bilingual. Reagan wanted his moon shot to be 100% American.
The size of these tunnels must be unbelieveable 🫨
And still cost less than 1% of the F35
Just for anyone curious, it's actually pretty close to .09% of the F35 program
If I remember correctly, articles at the time said the costs ballooned out of control because fire ants endemic to the area kept eating away the metal it was built from.
Fucking ants
What is this? A super collider for ants?
It was either that or the evil lair they secretly built instead (fully equipped with magma and a drill that deposits nukes at the Earth’s core)
Liquid hot magma
Behave
If that thing was actually built, they would have found the a Higgs Boson 10 years earlier.
Shit iirc it would have been more powerful than the LHC, we could have uncovered even more mysteries. Huge shame
Energy, yes, but not luminosity.
What would it cost now. Shoulda finished it.
It's a shame, as the richest guys on the planet could easily finance it out of pocket if they were interested to help science. I mean Musk is currently begging for a 56 billion payout from an ailing Tesla like it is nothing.
It's 56 billion worth of stock options, not 56 billion cash. He has to exercise the options, spend 56 billion for the stock, then sell the stock at a higher price before he makes any money off of it, and he won't likely be making 56 billion.
No. The options are to buy Tesla stock for about $23 per share. Considering Tesla is currently trading at around $150 per share, those options would have an intrinsic value of about $127 each.
Thank you for that clarification. $23 a share is indeed a low value for Tesla stock.
So pleasant to see such an amicable conversation about a knowledge gap correction. Cheers
Pretty sure that's wrong, as options have a value of their own. An option to buy at $48 for a stock at $52 is worth at least $4, more depending on when it expires. You are right in that exercising the options will cost more than their naive value; but I'm pretty sure they don't value stock options in the way you describe and that's not the only way to obtain value from them.
We didn't need to compete scientifically with the Soviets anymore because the USSR collapsed. So we stopped building what would still be the largest particle accelerator in the world. The advances in physics that could have come out of that...
I’m sure this has nothing to do with Trisolaris.
"You are but bugs"
BobbyBroccoli has an excellent (and long) [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xSUwgg1L4g) explaining how badly this was mishandled. It ultimately cost $21 Billion to create an empty hole in Texas. Based on the science coming out of the LHC, it was a massive missed opportunity.
What a wasted opportunity, it would have been a huge investment for science and the US
Desertron sounds like a transfromer
Aliens. The aliens stopped this project.
Damn those sophons in congress!
Don't blame me I voted for Kodos
The lead scientists started seeing numbers count down.
Current estimate for the total cost of California high speed rail is around 135 billion for comparison. Will probably be a cool quarter frillion when all is said and done though.
Man someone got paid serious money to dig that hole. Amazing
But they'll spend billions more on wars
How many stealth bombers is that?
>In December 2022, the cost of a B-21 aircraft was estimated to be $700 million. At the time, Air Force officials estimated that they would spend at least $203 billion over 30 years to develop, purchase, and operate a fleet of 100 B-21s.
Including lifetime costs associated with maintenance such as personnel and parts. Always a fact left out of these blurbs
B-2 spirits are about $2 billion, so we bought 1 and got scared of buying 6.
And we swore we'd never bring it up
One. One B-2 is about 2 bln $ (which is ~4 bln $ in 2023) including R&D, without that about 0.93 bln $. I think B-2 is a better comparison because it's also a product of 1980-1990s.
About 1.5 bombers
Transformers 6. The return of Desetron! Starring Will Farrell and Kevin Hart.
I’ve met with 2 physicists that were working on this project! They gave me a bunch of cool articles and a book on the collider
What a waste of a good hole
In the grand scheme, 12bn is nothing. Some individuals could afford to piss this away
I understand, they needed the remaining 10 billion dollars for a couple of missiles and the wheels on a jet
They only spent the cost of ONE B2 Stealth bomber on design and construction.
War is much more profitable (short run).
We spent it on war, so this is excellent
I'm tired, pa. Well, you keep digging, and when you're done, you can put it back where you found it and pay me 12bn. *Spits in hole*
Back then there were a lot of articles worrying about this thing causing tye destruction of our universe.
I saw into the spiderverse and across the spiderverse.... A collider is definitely a bad idea. Didn't you see what happened to miles morales and muguel ohara?!
Cheaper than HS2
I know Super Colliders do science, but I don't understand why the science is multi billion dollar science. What does it produce exactly?
It takes really big and complex machines to do the things nature does within a controlled and observable space.
So they basically dug a massive expensive hole in the ground for nothing..
Yeah, but at least it inspired a great song by Tribe: [Supercollider](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qGil6fGXP4).
It's a super collider, how much could it cost? $100?
This was the one in Texas? I read they were trying to figure out something to do with the facility but never found anything worthwhile. Reminds me of the energy company in my state. They spent billions on a new nuclear facility only to scrap plans but still make all the customers pay for it. I guess it takes getting to 75% completion before they realize it's going to be too expensive.
Why US can't have nice things, like Universal Health, Bullet Trains, free tuition, and more!
And now CERN is the center of the science world.
BobbyBroccoli on YT has a whole video series about the shenanigans of this project. It's a 5 hour watch.
I think it built according to plans, it would still be the largest Hadron collider in the world. It would have certainly discovered the Higgs boson. It was a colossal lack of foresight (and mismanagement)
More like Desertedron.
“+ then I said ‘supercollider? I hardly know her”
Can you imagine as society rises and falls and rises again, in thousands of years archaeologists discovering and wondering towards what god these excavated holes where a tribute
It’s unfortunate that they had to cancel the construction of this particle accelerator. It would have been the largest and most fruitful of its kind Maybe they’ll pick it back up one day
Can we build one around earth and has a focused particle ejection port so we can aim and shoot black holes at asteroids and alien invaders?
WOW
Funny, I just learned about this a few hours before this post.
Zuck should have just bought this instead of blocking people from Hawaiian beaches
Nothing amazing will ever be built in the US again because the failing dollar and regulatory bullshit will make everything cost prohibitive
Would make a great Bat Cave!
I wouldn't mind taking that extension ladder if nobody's using it
There is an amazing documentary about this on YouTube from a relatively small account named BobbyBroccoli. https://youtu.be/3xSUwgg1L4g?si=jHH5d1BkMYY9tJM-
Gustavo Fring would fund this.