We don’t need the LHC for that.
It’s 42.
Let me be clear in case anyone is mis-interpreting my OP - I personally am not afraid of this. I just wanted bigger brains than mine to give me a better idea of what is going on and what is at stake (if anything).
Another thing, the LHC is only being TESTED on the 10th, in fact they’re just testing the magnets for acceleration, nothing (substantial at least) is actually being crashed into each other until late October, so if you’re gonna panic you can at least wait a month and a half.
Edit: Feather, when I say “you” I don’t mean you I mean people in general (such as Argent) who have already gone through a years supply of paper bags.
That’s right. Should we let Lee Harvey Oswald off the hook for shooting Kennedy? I mean, he died instantly. He didn’t suffer.
If the actual scientists that designed, built and will activate the thing aren’t worried about it, that’s good enough for me. I know that’s not a fashionable viewpoint, what with everyone being an expert on everything these days.
Also I should add that I think the only reason there isn’t a public outcry about this is because most people don’t know about it. If this were widely publicized in the news, there would be a huge movement against it, with protests from environmental groups and possibly even people trying to sabotage the LHC by destroying parts of the machinery.
Those aren’t even close. You have a better chance of killing yourself by firing a bullet around the world to hit yourself in the back of the head. Drunk. While blindfolded. In an earthquake.
More likely, they would be stuffing their shoes into it.
If you’re as desperate for an end of the world scenario as you sound, you really should try to go with something that actually has a marginal chance of occurring – some viral pandemic, or maybe a honkin’ big asteroid. Perhaps an outbreak of the Yellowstone super volcano. Heck, dolphins suddenly evolving thumbs and going all eye-for-an-eye on us ocean-polluting humans.
Pretty much the only way the LHC could conceivably harm you is if you run at it and hit one of them big quadrupole magnets with your head. Well, I suppose you could also try and gnaw through some high voltage cables or somesuch.
But other than that? There’s nothing happening there that’s not happening a gazillion times over in nature, with no discernible consequences. You’ve been told that a couple of dozens of times by now; to be scared still is just wilful ignorance on your part.
The blades you use for your daily shave pose a far greater thread to both yourself and humanity, and yet you won’t see anybody getting all paranoid about them on the internet. Because the scale of the risk means it just isn’t worth getting all worked up about.
Oh, I dunno, I think being inside the accelerator tube when they pull hard vacuum and fire up the proton beam might not be too healthy. Even the odds of that happening are far greater than the formation of a world-eating MBH.
I picture the events leading up the the Hadron Event occur thusly:
Tech in labcoat throws the switch. (No not THE switch, the switch next to it that spools the anterior fluxbat flavenoids to full angularity)
The head of Cthulhu peers out of an adjacent dimension, says the equivalent of ‘Don’t do that’ and neatly removes the WHOLE FRIGGEN THING from our dimension, leaving a concrete 17 mile ring, which, after some consideration, we turn into a NASCAR track, because, hey, Hadron Collectors are expensive, and we taste good with ketchup.
You realize, you now gotta cut Cervaise in on the book deal.
(So who should direct the movie version? They better get that killer toenails scene down perfect.)
You probably would, but that has more to do with Joe Average being kinda stupid than with it actually being a threat.
An excellent point to keep in mind when discussing anything that is even remotely related to science and medicine. (I call it Six O’Clock Science myself - they put some scare story on the six o’clock news that bears almost no resemblance to what is actually going on in that field, they only represent half of the story, they retract nothing if proven wrong, and they never, ever follow up.)
If you are trying to start a “Worst analogy in the world” contest, you should take it to The Game Room. Trust me-if this experiment destroys the world, nobody is gonna get blamed for it.
Yeah, but the question certainly isn’t “What do you get when you turn on the LHC?”
That sure as hell seems like the question to me.
“What do you get when you turn on the LHC?”
“42.”
No, doesn’t work, you see.
It seems like it. The scientists don’t have a direct, focused, specific goal or expectation of what they’re going to find, do they? It’s basically just, “let’s see what happens here.”
Sure they do. One of the things they expect to find, if it exists, is the Higgs boson which is the particle believed to be responsible for matter having mass. But, of course, there are lots of unknowns. That’s the whole point of building it. if they knew exactly what they were going to find, they wouldn’t need to build it. The whole point of the machine is to recreate the conditions close to the Big Bang, so that scientists can directly observe what happened during the first few billionths of a second during the creation of the universe. I don’t care who you are, that’s exciting stuff.