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Could the Large Hadron Collider at CERN Destroy Our World?

By crooky | March 24, 2008

In a few short months, some of the brightest minds in Particle Physics in the world are going to start an experiment in Geneva that, according to some, has the potential to tear our entire planet to pieces. I’m not one to buy into sensationalist notions but there has been enough chatter about the upcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN that I feel it’s worth writing about. A consortium of world-class particle physicists (more than 2200 of them) have been working on this $10 Billion experiment for most of the 2000s.

Here’s a video showing off the facility nearing completion last year and telling a little bit about what it’s going to do:

Sounds good but there is some controversy, which CERN claims to have addressed, around the creation of micro-black holes and strangelets. The former, you can understand why there would be concern but scientists assure us that any miniscule black holes that could be produced in a lab would burn out really fast and wouldn’t implode the earth.

The latter - stranglets - are another matter. Here’s what wikipedia has to say:

If the strange matter hypothesis is correct then if a strangelet comes in contact with Earth (or any other lump of ordinary matter) it could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter. This “ice-nine” disaster scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter, at the end of which all the nuclei of all the atoms of earth have been converted, and earth has been reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter.

If that doesn’t freak you out a little, you haven’t been reading enough SciFi.

There are also some strange potential positive benefits of the LHC at CERN, including possibly… time travel. Yes. Time Travel. Read more about this theorey here.

In the end, I always come back to the precautionary principle - if we’re not confident that this experiment won’t destroy the planet, we shouldn’t do it. I’m just not informed enough to know if we’re confident that it won’t or not.

Food for thought.

Update: March 28, 2008

A Hawaiian botanist is suing CERN to stop the LHC project from going forward citing global catastrophe concerns.
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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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2 Responses to “Could the Large Hadron Collider at CERN Destroy Our World?”

  1. Moscow never sleeps Says:
    July 13th, 2008 at 8:37 pm

    I think there are no reason to care about end of the world. The maximum what can happen its complite annihilation of France and Switzerland and global Ice Age after it!

    For security reason I suggest to the civilians in the location of this machine to leave this place at time of experiment, and the people who do this experiments to warn those people before machine start to go on full power - for them to pray!

    And this will never happen, because its stupid as a fact… Live such long time by creating such long history of human race and to reach the final step its destroying of all(except of correcting), for Nova World!??? I think God have a lot of places in his\she’s hands to create New Worlds, or you think we dont like them because a lot of p0rn in internet!? OK… For example, the God is hate the p0rno, but why he is create them?

    K.O. Have Nice Day, France and Switzerland! ;-)

  2. crooky Says:
    July 17th, 2008 at 4:12 pm

    I think this is one of my favourite comments ever.

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