I wonder how much money we put into making the colliders used to find most of those? I wonder if it would have been better spent on something more.... Practical... I guess I just have a hard time being ok with throwing our money into seeing what everything is made of when of could be spent on research for cures to diseases, lessening world hunger, using a hadron collider as a WMD, keeping out environment from going to hell, finding a replacement for fossils fuels, giving those developing nations a push into the modern world, etc etc
Going from the figure Sheb stated, the LHC cost approximately 1.2% of the Defence Department spending for 1 year. Of course, the LHC was built from 998 to 2008, I think, so that's spread over 10 years, so 0.75 billion dollars a year, say.
In comparison, the cost to solve world hunger would be around 30 billion dollars, or 4.8% of the yearly Defence Department budget.
The US has the largest two air forces in the world. The first is the USAF. The second is the US Navy. The US navy is larger in ship tonnage than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which are allies of the US. The US is in no danger by any one or combination of nations. So of places money could come, the defence spending of one year would work without even a slightest risk to Pax Americana.
NINJAEDIT:
I was being sarcastic....
I have no problem with this program and I thought people would notice the joke or two inside of that...
I've seen a lot of people comment those exact words seriously (minus the WMD part). But I've written all this now. Ah, well.