Bummed about the LHC? Try some THC.

Now that we've covered the extremely fascinating buffalo phenomenon in some detail, I would now like to move on to a somewhat less important issue that I consider to be a slight bummer: there's a chance that this machine CERN is building in Europe is going to cause the entire planet to get sucked into a black hole, or something like that.

I'm talking of course about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The point of this thing is to determine what shit is made of by slamming together large hadrons, which are one of the main basic components of shit, at near light speed. (Clarification: by "shit" I mean stuff in general, not actual fecal matter, although fecal matter is indeed one of the countless types of shit out there.) Hadrons are sub-atomic particles, protons in this case. As for the "large" part, that beats me because something that's smaller than a hydrogen atom seems pretty damn un-large to me. Maybe the next time a girl expresses dissatisfaction with the dimensions of your junk, you can use the LHC to convince her that the item in question is in fact fairly large ("At least it's not subatomic!"). One of the big ticket items they're looking for is the "elusive" Higgs boson, a goofy-ass sounding particle that many scientists theorize gives mass to certain things, including EVERYTHING IN THE F***ING UNIVERSE. If it really is true that we're all nothing more than big walking piles of Higgs bosons, then getting sucked into a black hole may not be such a terrible fate after all. I could not imagine a more depressing revelation.

So when they fire this thing up and start testing, probably sometime between August and October 2008, one of six things is going to happen:

1) A micro black hole is created and it swallows the planet, killing us all.
2) A stable form of strange matter is created and converts the entire solar system into strange matter, killing all of us in the process.
3) A wormhole is created, which may serve as a portal for beings from the future to send something back through time, possibly to kill us all. The wormhole would be microscopic, so the thing they'd send back through it would probably be more like a self-replicating killer nanorobot and less like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

4) Something else crazy happens, killing us all.

5) Nothing happens, so they build a bigger atom-smasher, which kills us all.

6) We find out what shit is made of and unlock a few more of the great secrets of the universe. We live to fight another day.

So out of six possible outcomes, only one leads to an outcome that doesn't involve us all being killed. It doesn't meet Meatloaf's standards (which would be 4 out of 6 in this case), but apparently the scientists at CERN don't consider an 83.3(repeating)% chance of the planet being destroyed enough of a threat to stop them from firing this bad boy up for the off-chance that they might be lucky enough to see a couple of Higgs bosons, the Boson Red Sox, or Boson the clown. Furthermore, something you might find particularly disturbing is the fact that most experts out there believe that micro black holes WILL be created by this thing, but believe that they pose no threat to us because they'll instantly evaporate via Hawking radiation. This theory comes from this one time at band camp when Stephen Hawking left a cup full of black holes on the table and came back a couple of days later only to find that the black holes had vanished into thin air. That story should put your fears to rest - if the black holes evaporated last time then there is no reason to doubt that they will evaporate again.

So we could be on the brink of the end of humanity, which you have to admit would sort of suck. In fact, I would go so far as to rate its bummification potential somewhere between that of the Steelers failing to make the playoffs and DICKipedia refusing to recognize my brilliant contributions to the science of creating a sentence solely out of the word "buffalo." Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it either, so it seems the best thing to do is accept our fate and blaze up a fat blunt while we're waiting for the black hole or nano-Schwarzenegger from the future to put the ultimate smackdown on all of us.