&gt; But this zooming in demands evermore energy, and the difficulty and cost of building new machines increases exponentially relative to the energy requirement, Gross said.<p>Part of the problem is, as Gross points out, that the cost of experimental research at extreme scales is far out of sync with the cost of theoretical research.<p>The cost of the LHC and the annual budget of NASA are, for example, are around O($10B).<p>Compared with the value of the US economy (just for comparison), which is O($10000B) or so, this doesn&#x27;t seem all that high.  Of course the problem is that no <i>direct</i> economic output stems from constructing machines for experimental research.  In addition to cost, there are the problems of time (how long experimental work takes) and engineering manpower that might be better spent elsewhere.<p>In any case, it doesn&#x27;t seem obvious to me that in a different economic context than the one we live in, which is largely focused on wasteful consumption and war, that far, far more money couldn&#x27;t be devoted to experimental research.