The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.
But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act. [NY Times]
Makes Global Warming seem a bit less dramatic, doesn’t it?
I was just wondering, do you suppose, after they finish the Collider, that they’ll make a few more, then start mass producing them and dropping the price so we can all have one? You know, like PCs and cell phones.
I wouldn’t mind having a small, personal black hole, into which I could throw things. For example, my snail mail, a few of my noisier neighbors, and war.
Strange matter indeed.
Metaphor 
I thought about that, but we just don’t know what might happen. What if, through some weird space-time glitch, he wound up as a junior high school vice principal in the 22nd century? The carnage could be even worse. Or what if he wound up as an element in our drinking water? We’d all be stupid megalomaniacs within a week. Can’t risk it. Better just to send him back to Crawford and invest in socialized mass psychotherapy.
could we toss our current commander in chief and his administration into this new black hole?!
…just an idea…
Now that latter question is a ponderable fit for a novelist. I’d read that: the world today if nuclear weapons had never been produced.
When the exploded the first atomic bomb over the desert in New Mexico, there were several among the scientists who predicted–or at least hypothesized–that the enormous heat from the fission would ignite the Earth’s oxygen, destroying all life. What if it had? Or, more interestingly, what if they’d never gone ahead with the test?