Quote Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro View Post
But we don't know if there are any obvious practical applications. There could be dozens that we just don't know enough right now to make sense of. We accumulate facts and then someone makes sense of them. So the pursuit of knowledge is a worthwhile goal. I wouldn't be surprised if just the process of building the thing taught them enough to eventually be worth the money.

And information about how the universe works is interesting, and therefore useful.

Isn't that black hole destroy the solar system stuff just rumor?
As I recall the scientists tried to disregard the black hole "rumor" not on the grounds that it was was false, more on the grounds of, "you don't understand how unlikely it is."

As to "interesting, and therefore useful", don't talk rot. That sort of argument is a complete non-starter, and is exactly the attitude that can be the problem.

Quote Originally Posted by Ironside View Post
I've never seaid anything about making that permanent on somebody, I'm just saying that use of the Greater Good is ironic when talking about people that cannot differ between the murder of a tyrant and the murder of a saint. Making it permanent would be even more ethically questionable than an icepick in the brain... since it's never been claimed to be a cure.
I'm not suggesting you think we should start making "brain hats" but you have to acknowledge the massive danger this sort of technology has.

But if you would like, we could go into more ethics. Would it be unethical to analyse what side effects of a certain brain damage (born with or caused by accident) has?
Would it be unethical to repair a mind of a criminal so he could start to feel compassion, something impossible due to brain damage, if he requested it? Now I'm only talking about the speciffic case.
You can't equate passive observation with intervention.

As been mentioned, the Hadron colider has not been run with the higher energy levels yet and even those levels have been reached in the atmospere by cosmic rays before. Should it cause a black hole devouring earth it would already have happened.
Theoretically it will produce those same (extremely harmful) cosmic rays, but as this is a mechanical attempt to replicate a part of nature we don't really understand (which is why they want to test it) and they don't know what they're doing, they're just "pretty sure".

Don't walk this path since it might awaken an angry God?
Much more concrete than that, there's no need invoke an "angry God".

Neuroscience is a field where etics is always needed to consider. You are aware that it's a field were they can make blinds see and restoring lost limbs (through cybernetics atm)? And that's not talking about people who have lost their long term memory or their left side of their body? Or consider their own limbs as dead matter stiched to their bodies? Because it might be abused, we shall condemn them to their fates.
Some technology isn't worth having, nuclear being one, and the overall benefits outweigh the costs. Nuclear technology very nearly destroyed us all, still threatens us, and the power plants serve as a sop to prevent the development of truly useful renewable energy.