Forecast: A 30% Chance of Planet-Engulfing Black Holes
Posted on September 10, 2008 @ 9:22 am
This morning’s top story at CNN.com (emphasis mine):
Shouldn’t someone have mentioned the whole “black hole capable of swallowing the Earth” thing — oh, I don’t know — yesterday? As it stands, I’ll barely have enough time before the Earth’s destruction to load my beloved Cocker Spaniel into a rocket and launch him into space, bound for a distant planet where he’ll use his newly-discovered superpowers to fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
Posted by Jess | Filed Under In the News |
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Ha! Great blog!
I’m a devotee of quantum physics stuff, so I’ve been looking forward to the LHC’s debut for a while.
Boy, do I sound like a nerd, or what?
@Leah: I figure if things get out of control, the scientists can always reroute warp power through the main deflector dish to create an inverse tachyon pulse and collapse the black hole/space-time anomaly.
Best quotes from both sides:
“Nothing will happen for at least four years,” said professor Otto Rossler. “Then someone will spot a light ray coming out of the Indian Ocean during the night and no one will be able to explain it. A few weeks later, we will see a similar beam of particles coming out of the soil on the other side of the planet. Then we will know there is a little quasar inside the planet and that this was a very serious mistake.”
versus
Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. “There is some minuscule probability,” he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”
Well, come quasars or dragons … it’s been a blast.
If you had been hanging out on the weird side of the web, you would have heard about this years ago.
@Thud: The Large Hadron Collider I had heard about. The imminent destruction of the planet? Not so much. That being said, I guess the whole “swallowed by a black hole” thing means we can quit worrying so much about global warming, right?
I was really hoping that when the protons collided, candy would pop out. But it never happened. They’re just testing it right now.
Black holes aren’t really that big a deal. In the incredibly rare 1- in-a-million chance that any are made, they won’t exist for very long. Now if they fired two stars at each other really fast and blew them up, THEN we may have a problem.
maybe well just wind up on an island like on lost. their not doing too bad.
Video for today…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiSkyEyBczU
I remember seeing this on TV somewhere this summer, and maybe it was an old documentary but I was led to believe this was still quite some time off in the future… and I also remember thinking, “they’ll never do it. they wouldn’t risk it.”
guess they would…
Never fear, Gordon Freeman is working on the project!
http://img261.imageshack.us/img261/5366/freemangz5.jpg
Or maybe we can just have Deanna Troi “mind-meld” with the LHC and befriend it. Then it really CAN spit out candy for us!
I think it’s really win win here; I mean, you either get an engineering marvel of a lifetime or you get a black hole that marks were Earth was for the next billion or so years. Kinda a sign saying “We were here!”
Think about it, if a diamond is forever, then what’s a planet eating black hole?
Craig, you make an excellent point.
But Jess, didn’t you hear about the lawsuit? Two guys sued the LHC last spring (from Hawaii I might add, which has no jurisdiction in Europe) for “possibly dooming humanity.” I’m pretty sure they lost.
there have been panic stricken trolls on thw WOW forums for weeks and weeks claiming the end of the world will come should the Large Hardon [sic] Collider work as intended.
LHC is completely harmless…just check out this webcam:
http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html