Hadron Supercollider = We're All in Trouble...Right About Now

[Jetman]

So, from what I hear France is turning this sucker on tonight, so hopefully all life as we know it doesnt end in the blink of an eye. In before the, "Its in France? No big loss if they go supernova" comments. Read up on it here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23844529/?GT1=43001

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/sc...20and%20Safety


So, what do you think guys? When does the risk to persue knowledge for science become too great? When do you step back and say, "Hey, this could be the next nuclear bomb or worse! Lets stop now!" Hopefully all matter and life isnt slowly being sucked toward France as I type this...

[Glitch]

I heard about this. Don't care.

[kuro]

Sounds like interesting stuff... wondering why I haven't heard of this before now.

[MarsKitten]

not dead yet.

[Mzo]

That is way too close to Hardon Supercollider.

[Fe 26]

Mzo? Your alive?

[kuro]

I'm changing my porn name.

[dakidski]

Its not like the world wasn't doomed anyway. At least we die by our own hand.

[Cowutopia]

It's not going to blow up. The argument for it blowing up was,

"Are you sure it isn't going to blow up?"

"Well, not 100%."

"Then don't do it!"

But it's not going to blow up. Really.

[Cowutopia]

Fears about the Brookhaven collider first centered on black holes but soon shifted to the danger posed by weird hypothetical particles, strangelets, that critics said could transform the Earth almost instantly into a dead, dense lump. Ultimately, independent studies by two groups of physicists calculated that the chances of this catastrophe were negligible, based on astronomical evidence and assumptions about the physics of the strangelets. One report put the odds of a strangelet disaster at less than one in 50 million, less than a chance of winning some lottery jackpots. Dr. Kent, in a 2003 paper, used the standard insurance company method to calculate expected losses to explore how stringent this bound on danger was. He multiplied the disaster probability times the cost, in this case the loss of the global population, six billion. A result was that, in actuarial terms, the Rhic collider could kill up to 120 people in a decade of operation.

Besides, the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons.

See?
That's fucking nothing.
Take a fuckin' chance. Pussies.