Bring on the Particle Collisions!

[swag]

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More



More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

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.

. . .

[hobbit709]

1. I'd say their heads have been hit by a "strangelet"

[Tuesday Afternoon]

2. I wish someone would re-arrange my molecules.

So bored with this current configuration :D

[Orsino]

3. It's gonna Do Things To The Cows' Milk.

It'll encourage gay feminist lesbian satanic Darwinism.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

4. If the earth is swallowed by itself in a black-hole event

Will Hillary and Barack duel forever at the event horizon? Or will the black hole settle the issue.

I'm thinking there's a plus side to this black hole thing. It will swallow up GD-P along with everything else.

In case the black hole actually happens: Fare well, DUers!

:hide:
:scared:

:hi:

[GreenPartyVoter]

13. Can you imagine the hell that awaits all the people going through something

hideously painful at the event horizon forever and ever? :cry:

Of course, if you are lucky enough to be engaged in something extremely pleasurable... well, that might not be so bad.

[Fire Walk With Me]

14. IIRC, relativity shows that to the doomed, the moment occurs in what is to them, real time.

It is merely frozen for observers.

[GreenPartyVoter]

15. That's good to know. Not sure who'll be observing us, though :^)

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

18. Oh, man, this is SERIES!!111

I'm going to start wearing clean underwear.

[Fire Walk With Me]

19. Alien observers shall forever respect your having selected clean underwear prior to being frozen for

the lifespan of the Universe. "He listened to his mother."

:thumbsup:

[krispos42]

27. It's not that series

I'll simply start wearing underwear.

:-)

[asthmaticeog]

5. What a way to go, though, huh?

See you on the other side.

[Dangerously Amused]

6. Funny. And a little scary.

But mostly funny.

[Neshanic]

7. On the bright side, it could open a portal for republican brain sucking.

[Dangerously Amused]

16. Republicans don't HAVE brains.

That's why they're Republicans. Silly!

[Juche]

8. bbc documentary covered this scenario

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1vKisefsuI

[Crabby Appleton]

9. I worked on the DoE Superconducting Super Collider project

(no, not a freeway) for a short time until funding was lost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

[Fire Walk With Me]

10. Don't fuck with strangelets.

Exotic matter is best left in theory. This is the equivalent of a child sticking a fork into an electrical outlet.

[Call Me Wesley]

11. I personally believe that the Large Hadron Collider

black holes are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there at CERN don’t have maps, and, uh, I believe that our particles like such as in the U. S. of A and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like, such as and I believe that they should, our colliding over here in the US should help the US, er, should help the black hole and should help the CERN and the strangelets, so we will be able to build up our strange matter for our children.

[seaglass]

22. That...was perfect.

:rofl:

[mainegreen]

32. Bravo. n/t

[Dangerously Amused]

33. Aaaahahaha!

:rofl:

[GreenPartyVoter]

12. Great. ONe more thing for me to feel scared about. I used to think this was

kinda cool but that was before I knew about the black holes and strangelets.

[kentauros]

34. Here's a good thread on this in the Environment/Energy forum

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=140493

My emotions are easily swayed by realistic movies and stuff like that BBC documentary. It is scary were it to happen that way. After reading more about it all (and I'm not a scientist) I am not worried about black holes. The stranglets do pose a possible problem. Perhaps they are not created in such quantites right away, but as I understand it, they also don't evaporate like quantum black holes do (or are theorized to.) If they manage to create a stranglet, it would likely take a while to accumulate, at least it seems like it would since there's a lot of space in "solid" matter. Assuming there was an accretion "hole" like in that scenario, wouldn't it accelerate with that much matter going into it? At that size, I don't think any of us would have time to react. Plus the atmosphere would be sucked into it the fastest. People at the opposite side of the planet would die of a lack of oxygen than from the world imploding.

Or it would sink to the center of the Earth and the planet would implode. What happens to the rest of the universe would be moot by then ;)

[Haole Girl]

17. Oh, well that's comforting

:sarcasm:

[GreenPartyVoter]

20. BIL says it's not really likely, and anyway we pretty much know

how the earth is gonna end. (Just check Revelations) :eyes:

[Elidor]

21. Black hole sun won't you come

And wash away the rains...

I'm ready for a big fuckin' black hole to eat this planet alive. Should be quite a show. Perhaps I should lay in a supply of mushrooms for the occasion. And with the Hole starting in Europe, we should have a few minutes to 'see' the carnage before we meet our ends. The only question now is the playlist for the evening...

I think I'll start off with Angelic Particles by Hallucinogen.

[tigereye]

23. I think those things are really cool

doesn't it take more than that to create a black hole, though?

[krispos42]

29. I think these are quantum black holes

With masses measured is millionths of a nanogram.

I think we'll be okay. :-)

[tigereye]

30. yeah somehow I didn't think they were any big threat....

at that level...


(disclaimer _ I don't know that much about physics.)

[Xipe Totec]

24. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds nt

[pokerfan]

25. How to destroy the Earth

http://qntm.org/?destroy

#3. Sucked into a microscopic black hole

You will need: a microscopic black hole.

Note that black holes are not eternal, they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore your microscopic black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of Mount Everest.

Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the centre of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.

Earth's final resting place: a singularity with a radius of about nine millimetres, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.

Feasibility rating: 3/10. Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.

Comments: Getting closer!

Source: The Dark Side Of The Sun, by Terry Pratchett. It is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time, he was my original source for the idea, so that's what I'm putting.

[swag]

26. In the print edition, the collider was typo'd as the "Large Hardon Collider."

Hat tip to Aitch for the catch!

That's a keeper!

[pokerfan]

28. Talk about your sword fights...

[jmowreader]

31. Look on the bright side: the subprime crisis would be OVER!

Something tells me CERN, which is in Switzerland, doesn't have to file an EINS in the United States. Because, like, it's not IN the United States.