“The LHC is super-duper fly…”
yeah, but is it safe. Not everyone agrees.
The Mayan calendar ends in 2024. Bible thumpers and snake handlers all across Jesusland agree that the last days are upon us. We are in the end times. Sadly, it’s not even because Jesus is pissed. No, it’s more high tech than that.
I hope that the University of Wisconsin physicists have siphoned off most of their grant money by now, because in a few months when they really start hurling protons at each other at the speed of light, it won’t matter much. The Large Hadron Collider was powered on today and they fired off a few test shots. They don’t expect to create any dark matter right away. It may take months before they fire up a mini black hole, and then it will take months and months, maybe a couple of years before the earth turns to swiss cheese as the black hole enlarges and chews its way back and forth through the planet. Eventually we all appear on the singularity’s event horizon, and then like pet goldfish consigned to the toilet bowl, we swirl around and around and down into the abyss.
Not a bad way to go really, and we get to avoid election 2024 entirely.
It’s a good paranoid fantasy but that’s all it is – right now they are only sending protons in one direction, no collisions and some people are trying to insinuate the rash of 5.x earthquakes that happeed the other day could be the startup of the LHC and that’s ridiculous in the extreme.
I know. Things won’t get dicey until they hurl those biggy-biggy hadrons at each other and even then, the little black holes and eentsy bit of dark matter they produce won’t end the world for several months.
I dunno ’bout those technical details, but what you describe Frank sounds better than another election year.