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Sunday, March 30, 2008

Uh...maybe sometimes "Because we can" isn't enough of a reason to do something
Posted by Jill | 9:55 AM
From the "Holy shit!" file:

You know, it may not even matter who gets the Democratic nomination this summer, because there may not be an election in the fall. And it won't be because of martial law or Republican corruption. It could be a scientific experiment gone horribly amok:

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.


I'm all for science, and I know that things can sometimes go wrong, and experiments can have unintended consequences. But when the potential unintended consequence is complete destruction of the planet into a black hole, maybe "very unlikely" isn't unlikely enough?

And if the "unlikely event" occurs, who the hell is going to even be around to care about what happened seconds after the Big Bang?

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3 Comments:
Blogger Joshua said...
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Jill, you're a smart person. Why are you falling for this complete load of malarkey?
3/30/08, 1:58 PM  
Blogger casey said...
There is at least one positive result. The end of the Bush Crime Family!
3/30/08, 4:04 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Call me crazy, but I think the environmental impact statement on crating a black hole would be BRIEF.
3/31/08, 6:49 AM  
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