These kind of worries are nothing new - before the first nuke was detonated some people thought there was a small chance that it could burn up the whole atmosphere, turns out they were wrong. You're at more risk when driving a car or crossing the street.
My position on this is two-fold. 1) If there is a cosmic plan and humans have significance within it, the device is no threat. 2) If there isn't, I kinda don't care if it's the end of the world. It'll just be the way the cookie crumbles.
Oh c'mon, at least let me get to the legal age to make babies before you fucking end the world on me here. Seriously, think of the children! DN
Particle Collider? I barely even know her! And that's when they built the particle collider. But seriously, I really can't see a supercollider being a doomsday device. I mean, this is the same kind of reasoning that led to the belief in the 50s that nuclear power plants would create giant ants (or GIants, if you will) that would take over the world. And Im still not toiling in an underground aphid farm.
I was all about the doomsday weapons back when I was in science. Not anymore though, there's just no future in it.
Maybe our planned significance is to build one and have Earth swallowed by a black hole, so the aliens observing us can say, "Huh. Guess we won't try that...." Also, "exotic matter"? Sounds like they're working on making the Infinite Improbability Drive.
That is so funny! It seems that those kooks have no understanding of how the universe works. I'll explain just the black holes one, since that's the most commonly spread buzzword in there. Black holes are what happens when matter is so compressed that it begins to bend spacetime. They don't have a magical super gravity, they are just more dense. If our sun were to magically transmute into a black hole, the orbit of the Earth would continue as it has for so long. It is true that black holes can collide and combine into a more massive singularity, but there is something that these idiots seemed to forget. Black holes evaporate, and they do it at a rate inversely proportional to their mass. Even if a collision made a million black holes of subatomic mass, which by some intervention of God didn't evaporate immediately, the combined black hole would still be so small it would evaporate in a fraction of a second. There would be a small burst of gamma radiation, and it would the coolest scientific discovery ever. Basically, the threat to the Earth is zero. D_C, I'm with you on the tinfoil hats.
I'm surprised they didn't mention collapsing the false vacuum as one of the possible doomsday scenarios. That always used to scare the willies out of me when I was a kid.
I love this image. Lil' Phy, chilling with his dog-eared copy of "A Brief History of Time," freaking out when he reaches the part about the false vacuum. And Mom 'n Dad have to turn on the Hoover and suck up some dust bunnies to prove that everything is still okay. Yeah, I have no idea what a false vacuum is.
Scientific American too.. Very cool stuff. Ultimately though, why is everybody so stressed?? If it did happen, we wouldn't even know it did....
As far as I am aware, particle collisions of the magnitude that the LHC can create happen quite regularly in the earth's upper atmosphere, so the risk of strangelets, micro black holes or whatever other bizarre doomsday stuff is related to the LHC is pretty much zero.
