Monday, July 21, 2008

Large Hadron Collider is coming....


Not that the world is going to end or anything. I mean, probably not. Sure, some crazy people think that this will create microscopic black holes that will fall into Earth's gravity and feed on the core of the planet, growing exponentially fast until everything is part of it.* How ironic would it be for our evolved intelligence to bring about our very destruction? Ha! But what are the odds that THIS is our Great Filter?
It is not far fetched to suppose that there might be some possible technology which is such that(a) virtually all sufficiently advanced civilizations eventually discover it and (b) its discovery leads almost universally to existential disaster.
  • Nick Bostrom (May/June 2008). "Where Are They?". MIT Technology Review.
Have a good night! ^_^

*The great thing about this idea is that we wouldn't necessarily even know it had happened until shortly before the world ends! Of course, it's unlikely to happen. LHC-like collisions happen all the time in our upper atmosphere. So, if microscopic black holes were going to devour us, they should have done so already, right?++

++Of course, matter is much denser here on the hard surface of the planet. The upper atmosphere is mostly empty vacuum, actually. But, that probably won't make a difference. Surely all the scientists have already thought of that, right?**

**Right?][

][Man, I hope the world doesn't end before PAX.

2 comments:

  1. Good comments...

    What you get when you mix high energy colliders, Professor Otto Rossler's charged micro black hole theory and bake for 50 months to 50 years?

    Answer: A golf ball

    ReplyDelete