Thursday, September 4, 2008

If we make it past the 10th, October 21, 2008 May Be Our Last Day On Earth

It's possible we were wrong. It's possible the Earth may not be going nova after all. Rather, we may be sucked in an atomic vortex! How cool would that be?

Everyone's favorite black hole creating super-collider, (hear that Tevatron?) the Large Hadron Collider, on the Franco-Swiss border, appears to have set a go live dead date for the "first high-energy collisions" of October 21st. Provided we make it past the 10th of this month when the LHC is first turned on.

In an unprecedented feat of human ingenuity, it's taken 6,000 researchers, more than $8 billion dollars and over 10 years of work to destroy the earth in a few nanoseconds.

If "all goes according to plan, the superconducting magnets in the collider will zap atomic particles around the 17-mile tunnel at roughly the speed of light. Then the scientists will smash the particles together, replicating what happened mere nanoseconds after the first big bang." (science daily)

And then in 13.73 billion years another species in another universe will create another Large Hadron Collider, or even a Very Large Hadron Collider, to study what happened in the first moments after the big bang caused by this LHC.

Like our unanswered call to boycott the olympics, EIGN now continues its rally cry to boycott the LHC.

(image from boston.com)

1 comment:

jg3 said...

Is it just me, or do all these pictures of the LHC look like a cat's butt:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2008/09/080903112026.jpg

...oh, that's not the black hole you were talking about? My bad.