Well if they destroy the galaxy, when we all go to hell we can kick the shit outta them. Does that make you feel any better?
ITT man-made black holes
MottZilla wrote:Well if they destroy the galaxy, when we all go to hell we can kick the shit outta them. Does that make you feel any better?
No.
{DSG}DarkRaven wrote:Maybe. I never took physics class, to be honest. But I've still never seen the odds of anything happening expressed in scientific notation. It's always either been a percentage, or a "1 in X" possibility. I stand by my belief that any risk assessment that requires you to do math is trying to cover something up.
Here it is without math:
Both the article and Aegix Drakan wrote:the risk is calculated at about 10 to the minus 40 - a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000 chance.
It probably wasn't so much a matter of 'covering it up' as it was 'I really don't feel like looking up the proper prefix for a 1 followed by 40 zeros right now just to answer this guy.' That's a fairly substantial number there.
Thanks, Kairyu. It doesn't necessarily make me feel better, but at least my question is answered now.
DarkRaven what do they teach you guys in Canada scientific notation is pretty much a junior high topic in Mississippi which probably means kids are born knowing it elsewhere.
Also the space evacuation route or moon route is pretty much as bad as doing it on earth, if the stars align towards our doom then opening a dimensional rift or some other unpredictable disaster is pretty much bad news wherever we do it.
{DSG}DarkRaven wrote:A black hole does not reduce anything, so much that it crushes things with incalculable gravitational force. You do not get shrunk when you enter a black hole. You get ripped apart and sucked into a tiny object the size of a pinhead (or smaller), where your molecules will probably forever remain. I don't know how black holes operate when they appear and initially start consuming matter, but from a distance, as I understand it, they tend to turn things into long strangs of molecular spaghetti. I'm pretty sure that's fatal, and maybe even a bit painful.
:sweat: great. I feel SO much better now. Thanks a lot Dark Raven.[/sarcasm]
My question:
And then what? What are they going to do with these black holes that they make? Just look at them and say "Ooh?" I bet Cloral's right, we're going to find plenty of new ways to kill each other.
Kaiyru, A&D is about anti-matter, but the said anti-matter is made by the machine that they're talking about in this article. In the book, it uses energy to create matter and anti-matter. Which is going to be one of the last things this machine actually does.
AtmaWeapon wrote:DarkRaven what do they teach you guys in Canada scientific notation is pretty much a junior high topic in Mississippi which probably means kids are born knowing it elsewhere.
Dude, I was born and raised in Michigan, and I still live here. Look carefully at the spot that says location next to every single post I make. It clearly says "not canada". I take the blame for having a confusing avatar/title joke, but you really ought to watch the Flash Tub more often.
Aegix, I'm always happy to help.
Uhm... what the fuck guys... you can't be serious? This kind of mass ignorance and knee-jerk panic with nobody bothering to research actual facts is a strong reason America has gone from being the leaders of science in the early 20th century to an utter laughingstock in recent years.
The one mitigating factor is that the scientist's quote
We are truly journeying into unknown territory.is a bit misleading. The following would have perhaps been more correct:
"For most of the history of physics experiment has sustained a substantial lead on theory. Apples were observed falling before Newton discovered his laws. The speed of light was measured before Maxwell derived it while formulating his famous equations. And physicists puzzled over the photoelectric effect long before it was explained by particle-wave duality. Recently, however, theory has gained the upper-hand: countless mutually-exclusive models compete to describe the phenomena of particle physics, but we haven't been able to test any of them because their difference only manifest themselves at hereto unattainably high energies."
The Large Hadron Collider will hopefully give us experimental evidence eliminating or confirming some of these competing theories. In particular, two theories have made predictions we hope to test:
1. The Standard Model with Supersymmetry. The theory known as the "standard model" allows us to make very comprehensive calculations about how various subatomic particles interact with each other. Its predictions match experiment with an astounding degree of accuracy, but it makes one last prediction we haven't been able to test: supersymmetry. Roughly summarized, supersymmetry asserts that for every subatomic particle, a corresponding second particle with certain predictable characteristics must also exist. The problem? We haven't been able to actual find these "twin" particles yet. That's not a fatal shortcoming however: the twin particles could have energies high enough as to be unproducable using our current particle accelerators. Hopefully the LHC will find evidence of these "twins."
2. String Theory. One of String Theory's most striking predictions is that of extra dimensions, and the LHC might allow physicists to prove the existence of these dimensions. I won't elaborate as this point was covered in the article.
Thus, it's true we don't know EXACTLY what will happen, but we know the ballpark, and the earth mysteriously exploding is NOT in that ballpark. Nor is a resonance cascade, or the creation of a wormhole to hell, or any other fanciful scenario from fiction.
Lastly, I want to point out that 10^(-40) is not a scientifically-derived number, as there's no way to calculate a probability for this kind of thing. The scientist being interviewed most likely chose an arbitrary number so small he hoped it would come across to readers as "not fucking likely." In truth, the amount of energy being played with is so small that any large-scale catastrophe would completely fly in the face of everything we know about physics: the probability of the earth exploding due to this accelerator is comparable to that of the sun mysteriously failing to rise tomorrow morning, or water deciding to run uphill, or a bar of lead spontaneously transmuting into gold.
In short, there is no reasonable concern that this accelerator might bring about large-scale disaster.
I will be happy to debunk any specific alleged mechanism contradicting the above bolded clause.
Technically, a black hole would make the earth sort of implode, not explode. And although I see your point, I'm somehow not comforted when you compare this experiment with an apple falling onto Issac Newton's head. I'm no physicist, but as far as I know, there's a distinct impossibility that the apple might have swallowed the galaxy.
Of course, I am clearly biased towards the apple.
DarkDragon, even with that whole big post, I have no idea if you are in favor or not of them doing their experiment.
lord_jamitossi, I was the one who said most likely we'd find new and interesting ways to kill people. ;p I'm not Cloral.
Hey, you're right! Weird. I even went back and double checked before posting that. I must have been really tired when I posted.
DarkDragon does have a very good point. Most of us are really too into fiction and video games. There is literally no risk of anything seriously bad happening as a direct and unforseen reaction to this.
MottZilla wrote:DarkDragon, even with that whole big post, I have no idea if you are in favor or not of them doing their experiment.lord_jamitossi, I was the one who said most likely we'd find new and interesting ways to kill people. ;p I'm not Cloral.
I think he's just in favor of American's not being dumbasses.
{DSG}DarkRaven wrote:Dude, I was born and raised in Michigan, and I still live here. Look carefully at the spot that says location next to every single post I make. It clearly says "not canada". I take the blame for having a confusing avatar/title joke, but you really ought to watch the Flash Tub more often.Until I observe you in either Canada or Michigan I propose a theory that you exist in both places at once until my observation forces you to assume one state or the other.
And honestly I quit watching the flash tub a while ago because it just doesn't seem as funny anymore and though I like Shmorky I'm not going to pat him on the back for his latest work. I recognized the apple in your avatar from one of the flash tubs but I have better things to do than memorize the scripts to flash animations so pardon me for forgetting to look at the "Location" field of your postbit.
AtmaWeapon wrote:Until I observe you in either Canada or Michigan I propose a theory that you exist in both places at once until my observation forces you to assume one state or the other.
Maybe my current state of duplicity is a result of the black hole experiment already gone wrong. At any moment, by very being could be ripped from the fabric of the universe and splattered across a thousand star systems.
Or, I could just go on a canadian crime spree and then escape through my whirling vortex. Maybe I'm in favor of this experiement after all.
AtmaWeapon wrote:Until I observe you in either Canada or Michigan I propose a theory that you exist in both places at once until my observation forces you to assume one state or the other.
Schr�dinger's Raven is dead.
Tygore wrote:Schr�dinger's Raven is dead.YOU LOOKED IN THE BOX WHY DID YOU LOOK?
(Also wasn't it a cat?)
Also this.
AtmaWeapon wrote:Also this.Nice pull.
That's so insane it's frightening.
They're going to push the button next year. And this place is going to turn out like Doom.