Yes but what about the Thetans? Won’t somebody think of the Thetans?
Exactly. I just hope the last words aren’t, “Umm, oops.”
Apropos of not very much, the final words most frequently heard on cockpit voice recorders recovered from crashed jetliners is “oh shit.”
Perhaps every particle accelerator control room should be equipped with a voice recorder.
I’m laughing almost has hard has Billy Wilder makes me laugh with Some Like It Hot. I think I may have lost 5 i.q. points in that ten minutes. Fortunately, further neurological damage was averted by the protective consumption of a rather good zinfindel (Earthquake Zin from Lodi Vineyards, recommended).
Stranger
You think the black box could withstand a black hole?
It’s not the micro-blackholes we have to worry about, it’s all the zombies that will shoot out.
Really, if you want to subscribe to a doomsday scenario, the LHC is a pretty poor choice – even if you’re right, you’ll never get to yell that viscerally satisfying ‘I told you so!’ in the nanosecond or two before you cease to exist.
You’d be much better off hawking the end of the world due to the rollover of the Mesoamerican Long Count calender in 2012, that’s just about as likely, plus you might get a bit of fire and brimstone to gloat over.
Fire and brimstone and dragons and elves and orks and trolls and dwarves. And chipped street samurai with Dog shaman companions.
Well, naturally. You can’t expect him to spell out every obvious little detail.
Well, in John Cramer’s science fiction novel Einstein’s Bridge about the SSC, which would have been even bigger than the LHC, it’s …
… hostile ant-like creatures from another universe intent on destroying ours that swarm out. Switching on the SSC acts as an inadvertant signal to beings in other universes and this lot set up a wormhole that first appears as an unusual particle seen in one of the detectors at the accelerator. The end result is that this universe is destroyed, but the heroes have enough time to set in motion a scheme whereby steps are taken to prevent this happening in a parallel universe that’s the same up to about 1987, but in which their intervention leads to the SSC being cancelled in 1993. Of course, the twist is that this is our universe. Many of the events in American politics in the early Nineties thus turn out to have been manipulated by a secret conspiracy seeking to save the universe.
I thought it was quite well done. Cramer’s a physicist and I found the book one of the most recognizable portrayals of what life at a big particle physics lab is actually like.
We all have to go sometime, and if I had my choice of exits, it would be in the jaws of a mutant pleiosaur released from a giant block of arctic ice by ill-advised nuclear testing. Is that really so unusual an aspiration?
Sounds painful. I’d much prefer the “Oops”-style instantaneous universal annihilation; completely painless and there’s nobody left to feel bad about your untimely demise!
So so what if the odds are against it: go, CERN, go! 
I wanna be hit by a runaway tractor-trailer truck driven by the Incredible Hulk.
If only. You want to know what I and a bunch of my colleagues really, really want? We’re trying as hard as we can to get the LISA mission up and going, but launch has been about ten years away for the past decade. And even as NASA is pulling almost all of the funding for LISA, we’re still planning detectors at least three generations more advanced. What do we want? We want the Big Bang observatory, a dozen spacecraft scattered throughout the solar system, each with a full-fledged nuclear reactor (not just one of those wimpy RTGs like Cassini has) on board, to power 24 telescopes each comparable to Hubble, which are used for nothing but beaming the most precise and powerful lasers ever built between them over interplanetary distances, all for the purposes of hoping to gain some glimpse of information that’s been traveling to us since a time when the Universe was so young we have no clock which could measure that precisely.
That’s what we want. Can you and your associates arrange that for us?
Well, I dunno. Have you found evidence of a sign reading, “Wet Paint! Don’t Touch!” out there?
You want to peep at an underage Universe? That’s sick!
Yes, you’d just love an armada of orbiting nuclear reactors and laser beams to defend your cosmic pedophilia ring, wouldn’t you? But what happens when it all comes crashing down, and God finds out how you astronomers have been getting your perverted jollies? Not only will all life on Earth likely be destroyed, but the entire solar system will be listed as a registered sexual predator and be unable to find a job anywhere in the galaxy!
You could have this tomorrow if you and your cohorts would divert your energies from planning the overthrow of Western democracy and holding the world at ransom for ten billion Euros in small, uncut diamonds. You and your fluffy white cat.
Or was that the Bond movie I fell asleep to the other night? Well, anyway, stop trying to destroy the world with your ‘physics’ mumbo-jumbo. I’m walking here!
Stranger
“Scientists and Freemasons… same thing.” Good lord, that’s funny stuff…
Can these lasers be multipurposed to defend against a kzinti invasion? If so, then I vote yes.
You scream and then you leap; that’s how wars are fought. Besides, son of a sthondat garbage eaters couldn’t possibly stand up to a force of the Patriarch’s best warriors. Signal the invasion fleet to launch at once!
Stranger