I saw this story on people in Missouri (who no doubt have nothing better to do) finding the largest known prime number, and I couldn't help but think about what an utter waste of time, money, and resources it was.
I am, of course, as big a nerd as they come, but calculating large prime numbers seems stupid and pointless to me. I don't think we really gain anything from it. It doesn't advance crypto research or anything like that, and it's not really much of an engineering feat to do it. It just takes a really long time.
I did a quick back of the hand calculation with a researcher here, and we estimated that, given about 10 cents per kilowatt per hour, the 700 compute years it took to calculate the prime would cost somewhere between $100k to $300k.
That's a fuck of a lot of money to pay for a prime number.
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