Month: September 8, 2008 (Page 2 of 2)

On Wednesday, September 10th, CERN will be turning on their Large Hadron Collider and possibly create a black hole that sucks up our entire planet from the inside.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/08/particlephysics.physics

If we don’t get sucked into a black hole, this collider is expected to bring us a giant leap closer to developing a “theory of everything”. Sooo, the risk is erasing all human life along with any evidence that we ever existed at all and the reward could be as significant as finding God. Fun stuff, eh?

The risk of a black hole is supposed to be ridiculously miniscule. It’s supposed to be as likely as watching a pen fall through a solid table. There are some 8,000 physicists working on this thing so we can only assume that all of those optimistic opinions are correct. Afterall, we’ve had this situation before. When the first atoms were split in a little room in Chicago, the scientists working on that project didn’t know whether they would ignite the atmosphere or not. No worries, right? I guess you have to ask yourself though, if the chance of ending all life is .000001%, is that still too high?

The problem is, if this is our last two days in existence, we should all probably live it up, right? I mean, there are plenty of things that I can think of doing and saying to people that I would never, ever do if I thought I had to live with them for the rest of my life. Come to think of it, shouldn’t we just live that way anyway though? Do you live your life as if there’s only a couple days left? For all we know nuclear war could break out tomorrow or we could be wiped out by some act of God. Personally, I still feel reluctant. Pride and embarrassment are possibly the worst features of the human psyche.

The world probably won’t end in two days and you probably won’t have to tell all the people you know that you love them or do all the things that you were too embarrassed to do before. You won’t have to admit your undying love to your secret crush and you won’t have to spill your darkest secret to your family. You won’t have to decide which religion is right all the sudden or ask for forgiveness before you bite the big one. You can go on living your life exactly like you’ve been doing if you want. At the end of the day, even if the world isn’t going to end, is it really worth living that way?