LHC Flips On Tomorrow 526
BTJunkie writes "The Large Hadron Collider, the worlds most expensive science experiment, is set to be turned on tomorrow. We've discussed this multiple times already. A small group of people believe our world will be sucked into extinction (some have even sent death threats). The majority of us, however, won't be losing any sleep tonight."
Reader WillRobinson notes that CERN researchers declared the final synchronization test a success and says, "The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC will be made this Wednesday, Sept. 10 at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). The start up time will be between (9:00 to 18:00 Zurich Time) (2:00 to 10:00 CDT) with live webcasts provided at webcast.cern.ch."
Re:Death threats (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Death threats (Score:5, Insightful)
Insightful?
Logical fallacy is fallacious.
A threatens B because A believes B's experiments will destroy the world. B believes this is not the case.
There is no indication that B does not fear death.
B most likely falls in line with the general stance on death - B probably doesn't want to die.
Fermi Paradox? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this the answer to the Fermi paradox? [wikipedia.org]
If, given the expected number of star systems with planets capable of supporting life (which although may be a low percentage of stars still isn't nil), and given that evolution eventually results in intelligence (or at least there's a decent probability it does), then there should be plenty of other intelligent civilizations (certainly including post-Singularity civilizations). But there (apparently) aren't.
So either we're first, out of all those star systems...
Or just perhaps intelligent civilizations all eventually delve into the field of particle physics and build colliders... then wink out of existence in spontaneous black holes.
Re:Regular status updates can be found here: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thankfully, there is an RSS feed so you know in real-time if the Earth has been destroyed:
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/rss.xml [hasthelhcd...eearth.com]
But, what if the end of the world affects my DSL? Is there an option for SMS?
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:2, Insightful)
I always ask for the CV of whoever calls Sen. Obama "inexperienced."
They always make excuses, rather than disclose their own position from which they criticize.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't say that. Just keep quiet and when we're all still alive on Thursday, the naysayers will just go away.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you willing to gamble the existence of the universe on that untested hypothesis? Yes?
Sure, you could reply to this post thinking that nothing will go wrong; but are you really willing to gamble the existence of the universe on this untested hypothesis?
See, that's the problem with this whole line of reasoning: the idea that as the conception of danger increases, the less risk we are allowed to afford. And since everything has some risk, there is, afterall, all kinds of things we don't know anything about; and for all you know responding to this very post may bring about the end of the universe.
But the problem is that any actual risk doesn't need to be demonstrated, and apologists are left with the burden of proving a negative: that running the LHC won't bring about the end of the universe. That's why this is a fallacy, but it works in the same way all scare campaigns work: it affects the primitive part of the brain.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is really the big problem here: we like to imagine black holes as object that suck everything in, but that's only true of black holes that have star-level masses. A black hole sounds impressive until you realize it could weigh as much as a proton. At that scale, it's gravitational pull isn't really going to be big enough to be a big deal on the femtoscale. And at that collapsed size, there is no reason that it will go and contact anything it can suck in.