Super Collider? But I just met her. – post 128
This August, in Switzerland, the worlds largest super collider or atom-smasher will be switched on. What the hell is an atom-smasher? It’s a device that takes particles and speeds them up to as close to the speed of light and then collide it with an atom to see the insides of it. Pretty cool eh? Well, what if this super collider brought about THE END OF THE WORLD!
Some in the scientific community, and the world, believe that this new atom-smasher, which is about seven times more powerful then the current one, could create a black hole that would consume the world. Pretty damn scary eh? There is even a court order going on in Hawaii that is trying to block the start up until more research has been put in to it as “the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet.” Wow…
The other side says that’s not possible. The smasher is going to be doing collisions that happen everyday due to cosmic rays that have hitting the earth for… oh… the last 4 billion years.
Regardless what happens, the smasher is expected to make discoveries in to Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Even it’s surmised that it could find extra dimensions in space as it looks for vibrating strings that make up the building blocks of our whole universe. But are all these discoveries worth it if we’re putting the very existence of our planet at risk? To me, it’s seriously scary. If it happens will we even know before it’s too late or will it just be over and done with?
Just because we can doesn’t mean that we should. Scary, scary stuff…
Oh, and Chrono Trigger is coming to DS.
YEAH BABY!
Play Asia
July 9th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Whereas, to say that, “Some in the scientific community believe…” is technically accurate, it makes it sound as though the scientific community is split on this issue. Far from it.
It is only a hand full of paranoid “scientists” that are making these ridiculous claims and filing lawsuits. There are always those that look upon new technologies that they don’t fully understand with fear and the belief that this will be the thing that destroys the planet.
This is no different than when, back in the 1940s, another handful of terrified “scientists” claimed that detonating a nuclear bomb would ignite Earth’s atmosphere and burn it off.
Smashing two (or more) atoms together cannot create a black hole in the same since that we are all familiar with. The phenomena known as a micro black hole (or micro singularity) that some theories of quantum gravity predict “may” result from highly energetic particle collisions is immensely smaller and weaker than a standard black hole and would evaporate almost immediately after forming -posing absolutely no danger to the facility, much less the planet.
Actually, it would be wonderful if a micro singularity did indeed form in the collider, as the information gathered in the nanoseconds that it existed would confirm (or disprove) a number of theories and greatly increase our understanding of the universe.
So, in summary: It’s nothing to be concerned about. 🙂