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The End Is Near
By Claire Jeffers
del.ico.us
reddit!
I'm intensely intrigued, but mostly terrified, by the apocalypse. A fighter jet might roar overhead and the first thought that crosses my mind is: The end is here, we're screwed. Even my roommate's alarm sets me panicking (it sounds like the hatch alarm on Lost). There are mornings when I wake to that alarm and think: Must evacuate, grab passport, run.
When I found out that, according to the Mayan calendar, the world will end on December 23, 2012, I jotted down the date in my journal among other items like, We are the 1997 soccer champs! I was 11. That ancient prediction seemed eons away, so I didn't make a fuss.
When I found out the world might end in June 2008, I marked my Google calendar, in capitalized font. I was 22. And this was last Saturday.
A recent New York Times article entitled "Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More" clued me in on my newest obsession. It warned of the June 2008 deadline, stating, "a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth—and maybe the universe."
I don't know about you, but I take every word the Times writes more seriously than my bank statement, weather.com and my mother. Especially if its staff deems a story front page worthy.
News of the June 2008 apocalypse has come to light because of Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho, two scientists who think that their peers at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) have failed to provide information about just how destructive this $8 billion particle accelerator, aptly dubbed the "Large Hadron Collider," could be. After all, the picture of the accelerator looks like something out of Independence Day (picture Will Smith yelling, "I gotta get me one of these!").
I haven't heard squat about this imminent threat since my Saturday morning cup of coffee and a brief conversation with a roommate. So, I'll write it in caps, again:
THE WORLD COULD END IN TWO MONTHS.
Just to be clear: Two months is not enough time to travel the world, find your long-lost uncle, or do whatever it is you want to do before you die.
So, only two guys are concerned about what's going on in Geneva. CERN might get away with murdering the entire human race and planet earth, and no one else seems to be asking why?
Admittedly, fear of the world ending is usually rooted in feelings of helplessness and mortality. Fear can also reveal the truth, which is that a relatively small group of people (whether it's the CERN, the Taliban or the Bush administration) could potentially and will most likely clutch the fate of humankind and planet earth. And something tells me Will Smith won't be around to play hero.
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 27, 2008
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Ok, I get it, it's a soapbox - which means everybody and their long-lost uncle can get up and deliver their diatribe about anything they want. I'm for freedom of speech, really, I am!
I'd just like people to be informed before they start preaching doomsday. It doesn't help that the NYT has given 'science news' status to the legal attempts of two loons (they are not, in fact, two scientists) to stop the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) dead in its' tracks.
Here are the facts:
In 1999, Wagner wanted to stop the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) accelerator, on Long Island, from starting running, because it might have destroyed the Earth! We should be glad he's looking out for us, right?RHIC has not destroyed the Earth, in fact, despite running since 2000. I guess the physicists were right after all on that one.
But wait! What about the LHC? Just because Wagner was wrong before, doesn't mean he is wrong again, right?
Wrong. The energies of interactions which the LHC will be probing are measured in units of TeV - that's tera electron volts; tera means 1 followed by 12 zeroes.
The most energetic particle collisions to happen on Earth do not come from man-made particle accelerators, but from outer space. Cosmic rays are particles from outer space (probably from nearby active galatic nuclei! That's another story) with energies up to about EeV - that's exa electron volts, and exa means 1 followed by 18 zeroes. That's a million times more powerful than the collisions the LHC will make!
What does that mean? Cosmic rays are no fairy tale or science fiction. They exist, they've been detected, and their energies really can be a million times more than what we'll be able to make with the LHC. And yet those interactions in the upper atmosphere when cosmic rays smack into air molecules have not generated Earth-swallowing black holes or any other funny business which has destroyed us. We're still here. Cosmic rays have been bombarding our planet for billions of years, and the planet is still here.
As we struggle to understand Nature, we find that she is still far more powerful than our ability to control her.