For the price of the Iraq War, we could've build adjacent Large Hadron Colliders all the way up the West Coast.
The California coast is 840 miles, the Oregon coast is 296 miles, and the Washington coast is 157 miles, making the West Coast of the United States 1293 miles long. The Large Hadron Collider has a circumference of 17 miles, and dividing by pi gives a diameter of 5.4 miles. This means that it would take 240 adjacent Large Hadron Colliders to cover the coastline. At 6.4 billion Euros or about 9 billion dollars each, 240 Large Hadron Colliders would cost $2.16 trillion, which is less than Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes' estimate of $3 trillion for the cost of the Iraq War.
