nightcats's Journal: LHC or Mars?

I wrote a piece today that asks the question: what is more valuable to real advancement in scientific knowledge and social progress -- the LHC or travel to Mars? (the President has voiced his support for the latter as America's next great scientific adventure). My answer is that Americans really need to get over their lust for drama if they are to discover the genuine beauty of scientific progress:

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is, frankly, rather ugly. It doesnâ(TM)t fly, takes no glorious pictures of space, has no âoeone small step for manâ quote-book, and doesnâ(TM)t send us cool rocks. You canâ(TM)t drive a space car on the LHC, and youâ(TM)d better not go anywhere near it with a golf club. The LHC lacks all the beautiful theater and heavy-breathing drama of American space travel. But the fact is that manned interplanetary travel, with the technology available now, would be fairly banal in its practical revelations; just as landing on the Moon was really more an assertion of Americaâ(TM)s scientific alpha-dog status than a genuine exercise in an even mildly revolutionary scientific understanding.