STUB The M87* saga and the end of science.

The M87* picture saga points to several subtle but serious problems with our current civilization. Connected to bitcoin mining, the recent statement by Benedict XVI on "1968", the auditing profession, Max Müller and the Hindu scriptures, Putin & Trump, reproducibility, Bayesian statistics, political positions on immigration & climate change, and even good manners. It will take me a while to write it all up (if I ever manage to).

Scientific progress isn't going to continue forever. Nothing does. In HEP both theory and money can be brick walls. In the case of money, it's not that hard to conceive a rough order-of-magnitude hard limit based on clearly unsustainable economic growth vs. exponential experimental cost growth. That limit is much farther than the likely political limit. For an example of how hard things can get, look at decarbonization vs. yellow vests. Decarbonization is an experiment most people agree in principle must be tried, but its implementation is  more than sufficient to put an end to democracy. It can still turn out that democracy isn't really conceivable without a new, unused continent every 10-20 generations. On the theory side, there is no fundamental natural law saying humanity can progress forever either. What we take for granted is a 2500 year run at historical speed, which would likely compress to not more than maybe 10 lifetimes if we project back the speed physics sustained from 1890 to 1970.