Oh, for Og’s sake! Do you really think that a submicroscopic blackhole would take a long time to kill you? If it did, then, quite clearly, so much of modern physics is wrong that firing up the LHC is about as risky as you walking out the front door.
Neither does your fear of the LHC, but you’ve got it anyway.
And Preston Tucker was sure that his car was going to be the vehicle of the future and if someone were to tell him that it was going to be a complete flop and that maybe two percent of all Americans would even know that it ever existed in 50 years, he probably would have called them a twat too.
It’s really easy to brusquely dismiss someone’s misgivings or concerns away when you’re certain that you’re right. Unfortunately, people are often certain that they’re right, when in fact they are wrong.
Sure, you have a chance of surviving those things. There’s also a chance that the LHC won’t destroy the world. Do you think your chance of being caught unaware by a wild animal, DUIing maniac, an airplane crashing into your house, whatever, is significantly smaller than the chance that the LHC will work out perfectly harmlessly?
You could sitting in your house and an airplane could crash into it killing you instantly. A far more likely scenario, btw. You wouldn’t see it coming, you’d never expect it, or have any control over the situation. Does this upset you enough to put up an early warning radar system?
You are complaining about something that has such a little chance, yeah, maybe not zero, of killing you when there are so many other things that are far more likely to kill you out there. Most of them are outside your control and knowledge, too. I don’t understand it.
Utterly false assumptions on your part, in multiple ways. First of all, how well you drive is meaningless (and not merely because most people think they’re better drivers than they really are), but because quite often people are involved in accidents in which they have no control over. You stop at a red light, the guy behind you doesn’t, all your driving skills don’t mean shit in that scenerio. What happens if you don’t have your gun on you when you spot the wild animal? What about a plane that goes out of control and crashes into your house while you’re asleep?
So is the fact that nations like Russia and China have nuclear weapons. Do you lie awake nights worrying about that? Or do you “explain it away” by telling yourself that you don’t live in a target zone? 'Cause if you think that a total nuclear war wouldn’t ruin your day even if you weren’t at one of the “Ground Zeros” you’re mistaken. Completely and utterly mistaken.
Then you’d better start doing them, because the fact of the matter is: You can lose your life at any moment, through no fault of your own, and with no warning, no matter who you are or where you live or what you do.
Lets see, how many cars made today don’t have seatbelts? How many of them don’t have fuel injection? How many of them don’t have disc brakes on at least some of the wheels? Are there cars made today that do having headlights that turn with the wheel? There might not be a car built today with the name “Tucker” (if you don’t count this one, that is), but by Og, Tucker’s ideas are alive and well, and in cars today. That, I’m sure even Preston Tucker would agree, is the important thing. Sounds to me like Tucker’s car was the “car of the future.” (Oh, and I’m sure Tucker would have admitted the possiblity of his car not being built in the future. He spent a good portion of his time trying to keep his company alive, and he firmly believed that the other car companies were trying to force him out of business. Cite.)
Most people are wankers without advanced degrees. The guys who designed and built the LHC do have advanced degrees, and families to worry about. How many of the “LHC is going to destroy the world!” crowd can say that?
99% of the time spoken by someone who doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing to begin with. The stereotype of said individual is not some nebbish guy with a pocket protector, but of someone who’s family tree resembles a telephone pole. Why do you suppose that is?
“Here, take this thalidomide. Whoops! Your kid doesn’t have any arms or legs! Sorry!” - A bunch of people who almost certainly had advanced degrees.
Why do we act like scientists can’t make mistakes?
This attitude of “they don’t have advanced degrees, and so they are twats because they’re concerned about this” is the absolute height of ivory-tower, smug, pretentious elitism.
They can make mistakes, sure. Do you correspondingly refrain from taking any medicine? Why assume that the default probability of a world-destroying mistake is significant enough to worry about, at this stage when there is no evidence that such mistake has been made?
The problem with thalidomide, however, is way more complicated than you make it out to be. First of all, there are two forms of the drug, one is dangerous to pregnant mothers, the other isn’t. What no one realized at the time, is that we had no way to control which form was being made. The second is that trials of the drug done in England, well before it was ever done in the US, revealed the problem, however, because the US didn’t recognize the validity of those studies, it was tried out in the US with disasterous results. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about how to do drug studies, and science in general. In order to get the billions of dollars needed to build the LHC, the scientists involved had to spend years crunching all sorts of numbers (and then recrunching as technology and our understanding of physics improved) to justify the expense . The actual time frame is decades as the LHC is an outgrowth of the canceled SSC that the US looked at building in the 1990s (thus the proposals for that would have started being written back in the late 70s/early80s). Had the SSC not been canceled (for reasons of politics), it would have been three times as powerful as the LHC.
By your logic, someone with a broken arm who decides to go to the ER, rather than a faith healer, is an elistist.
I should also point out that raising this issue here an expecting to get an answer from the majority that “it might not be a good idea” (since you clearly won’t listen to the volume of people saying there’s nothing to worry about, I can only conclude that you’re seeking affirmation of your fears) is, to put it gently, a little less than “bright.” I think you’d be much happier if you hung out here instead of the SDMB.
Quoting myself is probably not the best form, but if there’s still some genuine interest in debating the LHC’s supposed dangers, here, again, are some arguments against mBH formation:
The system that failed has nothing to do with particle physics. This argument is as illogical as deciding you don’t trust them because the lead scientist’s car got a flat tyre.
Scientists can make mistakes, but only within certain limits. The LHC isn’t a bloody Infinite Improbability Drive - even if it was a black box (which it isn’t), that still wouldn’t mean that we couldn’t make accurate predictions about what it wouldn’t do.
a) If Eoin Colfer’s new book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series is that terrible, CERN creating an Infinite Improbability Drive would appease everyone’s wrath. Just saying.
b) Argent, I seem to recall in an earlier thread you saying you’d pay money for someone to sabotage the thing so it wouldn’t work. Now you’re complaining when it doesn’t work?
c) I want to print out Half Man’s list and carry it with me when the irrational worry gets a bit much.
d) I am still waiting for someone to make the inevitable “SHOOP DA WHOOP” joke when they test the collider.
As has been explained many many times in this thread alone, a microscopic black hole is as likely to form from natural processes as be created by the people in Switzerland, so I supposed you should get used to being terribly, terribly panicked by the idea for the rest of your life whether the LHC comes back online in a couple of months or not.
