So it seems that giant particle accelerator is going to be activated soon, the one that's going to discover the Higgs-Boson, and no I can't explain any of the words I just used.
But it seems there is some quasi-legitimate concern that the thing could create a black hole.
Sitting at the bar last night and pondering these facts it occurred to me:
What if a black hole is created? And what if it's small enough that, instead of destroying the world immediately, it would take a while, and we had a definite estimate of just how long it would be?
There are so many The World Is Ending Very Soon stories. What if the world wasn't ending very soon -- just sort of soon? In five hundred years, say. Two hundred? Sixty? What if the world had ten years to live?
Suddenly the story becomes not What would you do? (as all of the world-ending-tomorrow stories ask) but What would Humanity do? What sort of cultures emerge on a planet that knows that within the next hundred or two hundred years, everything will come to an end?
...Or do we already know the answer to that?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Great comment and excellent moral question.
Professor Otto Rossler of Germany calculates that a micro black hole would require 50 months to 50 years to grow large enough to be "problematic". But he could be miscalculating, would people show the same concern if the time frame was 500, 5000 or 5 million years? (Earth's life expectancy is 5 billion years).
CERN predicts that they might create micro black hole at a rate of one per second. CERN knows that Hawking Radiation is disputed by several peer reviewed papers.
What moral calculation is CERN making when they tell the public "no conceivable risk?"
Got LHCFacts.org?
Post a Comment