In practice, it is worth doing the computation now—we can easily establish this by looking at the past, and noting that the people who performed large computations then, would not have been better off waiting until now.
$30 billion is a lot of money compared to what you and I have in our pockets. It’s dirt cheap compared to the trillions being spent on unsuccessful attempts to treat people who are dying for lack of better biotechnology.
By far the most important way to reduce real life existential risks is speed.
Even if you could find a more cost effective research area to finance, it is highly unlikely that you are actually spending every penny you can spare in that way. The value of spending resources on X, needs to be compared to the other ways you are actually spending those resources, not to the other ways you hypothetically could be spending them.
Whether it makes sense in general doing a calculation now or just waiting isn’t always so clear cut. Also, at least historically there hasn’t always been a choice. For example, in the 1940s and 1950s, mathematicians studying the Riemann zeta function really wanted to do hard computations to look at more of the non-trivial zeros. but this was given very low priority by the people who controlled computers and by the people who programmed them. The priority was so low that by the time it advanced up the queue the computer in question would already be labeled as obsolete and thus would not be maintained. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that the first such calculation was actually performed
In practice, it is worth doing the computation now—we can easily establish this by looking at the past, and noting that the people who performed large computations then, would not have been better off waiting until now.
$30 billion is a lot of money compared to what you and I have in our pockets. It’s dirt cheap compared to the trillions being spent on unsuccessful attempts to treat people who are dying for lack of better biotechnology.
By far the most important way to reduce real life existential risks is speed.
Even if you could find a more cost effective research area to finance, it is highly unlikely that you are actually spending every penny you can spare in that way. The value of spending resources on X, needs to be compared to the other ways you are actually spending those resources, not to the other ways you hypothetically could be spending them.
Whether it makes sense in general doing a calculation now or just waiting isn’t always so clear cut. Also, at least historically there hasn’t always been a choice. For example, in the 1940s and 1950s, mathematicians studying the Riemann zeta function really wanted to do hard computations to look at more of the non-trivial zeros. but this was given very low priority by the people who controlled computers and by the people who programmed them. The priority was so low that by the time it advanced up the queue the computer in question would already be labeled as obsolete and thus would not be maintained. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that the first such calculation was actually performed