>Shelving discoveries based on the perceived effect they (could) have (who would even evaluate that?) is a slippery slope if I ever seen one.
This is precisely what should happen though. We made ICE powered cars that used leaded gasoline because reasons, but the results of that were horrible for everything except the ICE. We shelved that tech because it was just bad.
We've shelved the widespread use of lead in paint. We've shelved the widespread use of asbestos in lots of things. There's nothing wrong with realizing the juice isn't worth the squeeze. We know that it is something that happens. Sometimes we make something that comes with a heavy cost. Obviously we don't have a way to know that until it exists. Then again, we should be able to start recognizing that particular chemical chains results in bad things so we should be super careful with the new thing because it is looks like something we've seen before. We can do this with virus and what not. Why not with chemistry?
> There's nothing wrong with realizing the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
The LHC employs a lot of people working on smart things. CERN gave rise to the world wide web and there are many other innovations in computing, construction, and theory that come from the work being done there.
> The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. [1]
> Since the opening of Mercedes-Benz Stadium in 2017, the Falcons organization has publicly pegged the cost of the building at $1.5 billion [2]
It's the same order of magnitude of cost as a sports stadium. It's a tiny slice of the worldwide economy.
We don't know where the key discoveries in "theory state space" are, so we continue to search. Finding the right evidence or surprises could lead to rapid changes in how we think and view the universe.
I'm sure some medieval people must have found scientific tinkerers wasteful as well.
Diversification of investment is good. It's not like all research dollars are going to high energy physics.
What does the price of a stadium or the LHC have to do with the price of tea in China? You've taken the conversation in a direction nobody else was discussing.
It was well known that leaded gasoline was bad at the time it was invented; we kind of just ignored them.
The inventor of leaded gasoline (Thomas Midgley) also invented CFCs, but at least we didn't already know those were bad for the ozone layer at the time.
Shelving discoveries based on the perceived effect they (could) have (who would even evaluate that?) is a slippery slope if I ever seen one.