Can someone please help me understand why anyone outside of a small circle of curious science buffs should care about particle physics?
It seems the field has advanced so far that EVEN IF new discoveries emerge, they would be of no practical value.
I'm not saying it's not interesting (I like reading about it FWIW), and I'm not saying it will never ever prove useful. But from resource allocation perspective, tens of billions of dollars required for high energy experiments seem to be much better spent on other areas of physics. That is, until the civilization advances far enough that understanding the depths of particle physics or cosmology becomes relevant.
> It seems the field has advanced so far that EVEN IF new discoveries emerge, they would be of no practical value
Particle physicists would disagree. A complete understanding of quantum mechanics, squared with general relativity, is very likely to have practical applications.
Cliche analogy: if you thought the world was flat and ships were falling off the end of the ocean, you might be investing your money in world-edge-detection; and you might say there's no point in studying the edge of the world itself because no practical value can come of it. You wouldn't have any idea that circumnavigation was (relatively) easy once you understood more about the nature of the world.
Well, it's searching for the unknown and competitively FOMO -- fear of missing out. Searching for the unknown has worked great in the past. The physicists are under enormous pressure to publish good papers, and to this end they will push hard against the unknown, by whatever cleverness, directions, ideas, means, techniques, etc. they have. They may move to applied physics, research in engineering, etc.
It seems the field has advanced so far that EVEN IF new discoveries emerge, they would be of no practical value.
I'm not saying it's not interesting (I like reading about it FWIW), and I'm not saying it will never ever prove useful. But from resource allocation perspective, tens of billions of dollars required for high energy experiments seem to be much better spent on other areas of physics. That is, until the civilization advances far enough that understanding the depths of particle physics or cosmology becomes relevant.