Was it really necessary?

The greatest sensation in the scientific world these days in undoubtedly the Large Hadron Collider,(the LHC). LHC is the world's largest and the highest energy particle accelerator, intended to collide opposing beams of protons or lead ions, each moving at approximately 99.999999% of the speed of light. (Oh, boy!!).

  

CMS detector

Some commonly known facts about LHC 

• It is funded by and built in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.
  
• The total cost of the project is expected to be €3.2–6.4 billion. That is around 8.5 billion US dollars,  402 billion Rupees!! 
  
• Once the supercollider is up and running, CERN scientists estimate that if the Standard Model is correct, a single Higgs boson may be produced every few hours. At this rate, it may take up to three years to collect enough data unambiguously to discover the Higgs boson.
  
• Some 1,232 dipole magnets keep the beams on their circular path, while an additional 392 quadrupole magnets are used to keep the beams focused, in order to maximize the chances of interaction between the particles in the four intersection points, where the two beams will cross. In total, over 1,600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes.
  
• Approximately 96 tonnes of liquid helium is needed to keep the magnets at their operating temperature of 1.9 K, making the LHC the largest cryogenic facility in the world at liquid helium temperature.
  

Simulated event in the CMS detector

Now, lets look at some of the things happening in the non-scientific world today...

• Financial sector is in deep crisis and almost all stable Stock markets in the world have plummeted.  Wall street,is literally crying and beseeching for a bailout today. 
• In Haiti, a child is relishing its MUD cookie (yes, mud made into a shape of a cookie) as the family cannot afford to buy anything, NOT EVEN RICE..

Mud Chololate

• A kid in Zimbabwe thinks he's the luckiest child in the world because he can sleep on a bed of currency notes. Little does he know that that "bed of notes" cannot buy him even a loaf of bread (inflation is around 11.2 million percent).

• Terrorism is at its worst, the prime target this time being the developing countries, especially India. every week we read about bomb blasts in different parts of India.

As a normal, non-scientific human being, I always wonder, "Was it really necessary to spend so much on constructing LHC?" I know very well that LHC is undoubtedly the best research facility in the world, but has it benefitted a normal man, in this day of crisis? 

If I had all that money for myself, I would have spent a significantly high amount in philanthropy and charity. I am sure, even 90% of people who read this won't be different in this view. But then, Unfortunately, I, a common man, don't have that money and those people are SCIENTISTS!!