The LHC: Famous last words

All right.  We've established that there's a decent chance that the Large Hadron Collider is going to destroy our planet in these four posts:

• Bummed about the LHC? Try some THC.


• The LHC might not kill us after all!


• Sucker bet


• Particle colliders give me a "large hadron"

So, in the not too unlikely possibility that the human race is about to be permanently obliterated from the universe, are there any last words that we want to say before we go?  There damn well should be.  Before we begin the collisions, I suggest we send a message to the cosmos saying something like:

We're about to conduct a physics experiment that (brief description of what the LHC does).  It might kill us, so if you don't hear from us again, then that's probably what happened.  Peace out, homies - catch you on the flipside!

This message will serve as a warning to alien civilizations that are debating and blogging about whether they should run their own LHCs.  Why should we care whether aliens live or die?  Because we should care about the welfare of all living things, you selfish prick.  We're not so different, us and them.  Sure, they might want to kill us - I mean in pretty much every movie involving aliens, that's what they're trying to do.  We may want revenge for what they tried to do to Will Smith and company in "Independence Day."  But we really can't blame them, because the truth is that we also want to kill us (why else would we build the LHC?).  On top of this, we and the aliens do have common enemies, such as entropy, black holes, and France.  Entropy in particular is a real bitch that is strongly abhorred by all lifeforms.  F@%# YOU, ENTROPY!

Now you may be thinking, "Wait a minute, hotshot.  Sending such a message to aliens might reveal not only that we exist, but also where we are in space and the fact that our technology is pretty unsophisticated.  Aren't we basically inviting them to bring their ships over and blast us to kingdom come?"  Well yes and no.  By that I mean yes, but they might choose not to come and kill us because a) it would be a waste of their time, and b) they appreciate the thoughtful gesture.  Besides, we've already been sending "come and kill us" messages to outer space for a long time.  For example, the Arecibo Message of 1974 (see left) was basically a bunch of dots that translated to something like, "Hey guys.  This is the human race from planet Earth speaking.  Feel free to come over and cornhole us whenever you get a chance.  Here's some other information that will make killing us easier for you, like our size, our chemical makeup, and our location.  See ya!"

Now let's say we smash some stuff in the LHC, and lo and behold, we notice that a black hole has begun eating away at the center of the planet en route to killing every living human being, dog, cat, octopus, praying mantis, bonsai tree, Venus flytrap, mushroom, ale yeast, dinoflagellate, amoeba, virus, you name it.  At this point it is absolutely crucial that we alert anyone who might be listening of our impending fate.  At this point we need to send something that can really catch someone's attention, like a catchy tune.  My recommendation is Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel's "White lines (Don't don't do it)."  This incredibly persuasive little jingle describes in detail the great high you can get from cocaine and then tells you "d-d-d-d-don't d-d-don't do it!"  The moral of this song is fairly tough to figure out, but what I took away from it was that snorting coke will give you a terrible stuttering problem.

So in case you were wondering why I'm not a coke addict, there's your answer.

If that doesn't stop ET from building its own black hole machine, I don't know what will.  Of course, when we send this message out to the cosmos, we must make sure to remember to substitute "Large Hadron Collider" for all cocaine references.  Otherwise, the aliens are seriously going to wonder what kind of weird civilization thought it was that important to broadcast anti-drug messages to everyone in a 500 light year radius.