Campaigning allowing, I think I shall try to watch Horizon on BBC2 on Thursday night. It is all about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
The LHC is that machine the boffins there are building to try and learn more about the conditions during the big bang. There is some concern that when the machine is activated on November 13th it could cause the end of the World. We hear about lots of things which are supposed to cause the end of the World, like global warming, pollution, meteor strike or nuclear war but actually none of them would really destroy the planet – just human civilisation, which we think means the same thing.
If the more pessimistic predictions (like those from the Lifeboat Foundation) for the Large Hadron Collider turn out to be true it would be a different matter because if they found themselves creating a black hole on Earth it could actually destroy the whole planet.
I’m kind of hoping that those boffins at Cern don’t blow the planet up; it would interfere with my lifestyle considerably.
Rob Glover // Apr 30, 2007 at 12:33 pm
If you’re up for it, have a read of CERN’s own assessment of the risk.
Cosmic rays hit the Moon with energies still greater than the predicted performance of the LHC, and the Moon’s still there.
Skuds // Apr 30, 2007 at 5:41 pm
And pleny of cosmic rays hit the Earth too. Obviously I am not particularly worried – if I was I would be out misbehaving on a grand scale 🙂