What's the worst that could happen...oh, that's bad...

After watching Michigan get owned this weekend I decided I needed some cheering up. There was an article on CNN.com about a Michigan State student that rapped about the new particle accelerator that is being built in France and Switzerland. In the rap she explains very complicated sub-atomic physics in a simple and fun way. (A side note: I am as impressed as everyone else that Michigan State students are smart enough to do anything but keg stands and burn couches.) Here is the video:



Fun video right? Is your brain hurting yet? If you didn't quite get the lingo the Cern Large Hadron Collider is being built so scientifically minded folks can try to figure out crazy ass shit. If all goes well the collider will provide insights about anti-matter, the creation of the universe, the existence of other dimensions, and all sorts of other sci-fi type stuff. Sounds great right? Well there may be a problem. The experiments may create a new black hole every second.

Now Stephen Hawkings and others says that the experiments probably won't create black holes and even if they do the black holes will be so incredibly tiny they won't do any damage. Apparently any black hole that is created will be traveling at such a fast speed that it will fly right off the planet and off into space. If any black holes were somehow trapped on Earth, they would be so incredibly small they would only "eat" one proton every 100 hours and could pass through a block of iron that stretched from here to the moon without touching it. (Weird huh?)

I don't know about this though. I know companies do a cost-benefit calculation where they set an acceptable level of deaths caused by their product but in those cases they deal with relatively small numbers of deaths. Here, the smallest number of deaths associated with the creation of an unexpectedly large black hole would be...carry the one...cross multiple and divide...um...every living thing and planet in the solar system. Given the large possible "cost" I don't know if any benefit would be worth it. Beside remember what happened the last time man messed with black holes?



The Lifeboat Foundation, one of the critics of the new collider, has created a program to investigate and hopefully stop a particle accelerator from destroying, well, everything but that is not the only thing on their agenda. Aside from particle acceleration issues, the Lifeboat Foundation has projects aimed at preventing or defending against such annoyances as rouge asteroids, nanobot infestations, attacks from artificial intelligence, radical climate change, Internet destruction, nuclear holocaust, and alien invasion. Some of their projects actually seem pretty reasonable while others, not so much. Their plan for alien invasion? Diplomacy. What a bunch of liberal wienies. They conclude that any alien species that has the ability to travel across space must have the technology to kick our ass so all we can do is talk to them and hope they like us. I say when the aliens invade the time for diplomacy is over and we need to nuke 'em and we need to nuke 'em now. Let's send Sarah Palin with her bull moose rifle up to the mother ship and she'll take care of business. The aliens will rue the day they messed with humans and Alaskan vice presidential candidates.