"Keep your eye on this one folks. Either something very good will come out of this, or nothing at all. Or - you don't want to know. And if that happens, you will never know what did happen. That would be a blessing."
Who is ready to walk down the strange side of the road. Enough about the election for a day. Enough about the Cat (almost 5) hurricane in Florida. Enough about the 800+ point drop in the stock market. I am ready to talk about something much more uplifting. Like the end of the world. How it could happen without you even knowing it was happening.
Many of us have heard about CERN. This Euro-centric project with the Hadron Collider embedded within it. The collider which came online in 2008. Even though CERN came into being shortly after World War II, it did not really become known until 2008. Why? That is when the Hadron Collider came on line. So what? What is the big deal about about the Hadron Collider?
Here is the good news. Later on, I need to get to the maybe bad news. CERN was not controversial before 2008. But then the Hadron Collider came online. When that happened, the benefit of what it was looking for could be a huge boon for humanity. How huge? Game changing huge.
Using the collider to find the Higgs Bosson particle, is like looking for the golden fleece. Why? Dark matter and dark energy. Why is that important? It will allow us to jump ahead about six spaces on the energy technology board. Clean energy, abundant energy, forever energy.
That is the good news. As I said, using this super collider, should we discover the mysterious Higgs Bosson particle, and how to harness it, our energy and climate problems would be over - forever. But there is a dark side.
Last night, I was watching a YouTube video on the Hadron Collider, I saw something very disturbing. One of the most famous physicists from the UK, who is a part of CERN community, gave this dire warning.
Even though the collider is capable of doing something very good for the planet, there is also a risk of it doing something very, very dire. How dire? The physicist said it could actually create a miniature "black hole" within CERN. So, what is the big deal about a miniature "black hole"? It would only stay "miniature" (like almost microscopic) for a very, very short time. Then it would grow quickly. And in no time at all, it would start to swallow parts of the Earth. After it was done, all that would remain is a shrunken rock. A very dense shrunken rock, no bigger than two football fields wide. And what about the rest of us? Depends where you think the other side of a black hole is.
Keep your eye on this one folks. Either something very good could come out of this, or nothing at all. Or - you maybe don't want to know. And if something bad happens, you will never know. That could be a huge blessing.
Like most doomsday scenarios, I'm not buying it. The Higgs has already been found and confirmed. It opens a lot of doors knowledge-wise, but the utility of that knowledge, other than just the knowledge itself, is yet to be seen. Furthermore, the collider works by blowing atoms apart, not smashing them together as would be required to form a black hole. And the existence of a black hole other than in an already massive body (see Chandrasekhar limit) is wild speculation.
ReplyDelete