tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1726857302330470257.post8022070749258676323..comments2023-10-06T04:47:03.507-07:00Comments on Buffalo This: Particle colliders give me a "large hadron"Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01439068253417267767noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1726857302330470257.post-40048532367667936902008-09-12T12:42:00.000-07:002008-09-12T12:42:00.000-07:00Yes, those possibilities do make the LHC a somewha...Yes, those possibilities do make the LHC a somewhat less viable candidate for <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Filter" REL="nofollow">Great Filter</A>, which is automatically brought to mind anytime aliens appear in the context of physics experiments thanks to the namesake of the American answer to the evil CERN... that being Fermilab named for Enrico Fermi, of course.David A. Loboyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00560584664994095612noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1726857302330470257.post-67827765771003952542008-09-12T10:31:00.000-07:002008-09-12T10:31:00.000-07:00A third possibility is that they're made of dark m...A third possibility is that they're made of dark matter and this somehow allows either much easier relativistic travel or LHCs that don't destroy them. There is <A HREF="http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_matter.html" REL="nofollow">quite a shitload of DM</A> in the universe after all.Nickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01439068253417267767noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1726857302330470257.post-85563459979734029922008-09-12T10:11:00.000-07:002008-09-12T10:11:00.000-07:00Excellent catch - you have revealed what appears t...Excellent catch - you have revealed what appears to be a gaping plot hole in the story. However, you can rest assured that it is not. At the risk of alienating (pun intended) the non-nerd contingent of the readers of this blog, I'm going to explain to you two ways those aliens might have pulled it off. Here goes...<BR/><BR/>It does seem that the findings of the LHC will likely be an essential step in the long path to making interstellar travel feasible.<BR/><BR/><B>1) Do it somewhere other than the planet they live on.</B><BR/>For example, we could do this thing in space or on Pluto (and not even have to supercool) or even on Mars, and survive a black hole if it were created. A lot of people have the wrong idea about black holes: they're not active seek-and-destroy killing machines, they're just a lot of gravity centered at a single point. If Mars turned into a black hole, it wouldn't suck Earth in any more than Mars is sucking Earth in now. Now you may be thinking that launching these things into orbit would be prohibitively expensive. Maybe it would be - but what if the aliens' solar system had two Earth-like, easily inhabitable planets? If we did, you can bet your ass we'd already be living on both. In this case, they can afford to destroy one and still survive. Furthermore, they could still get the knowledge from the collider because the black hole would take a long time to destroy whatever planet it was on - and if it were in space, it would just fly off harmlessly and evaporate in the vacuum.<BR/><BR/>As for the strangelet scenario, they may have to be a little farther away (Pluto would probably still work), but if the collider were located in deep space, it's likely that the strangelets produced would just fly off into space without causing any problems.<BR/><BR/>As for the false vacuum scenario...well, you're screwed either way there. But come on, that seems <B>really</B> unlikely, even to a pathological doomsayer like myself. If it were possible, one would have killed us already.<BR/><BR/><B>2) Invent artificial intelligence before creating a LHC.</B><BR/>We may be only 20 years from this, and the LHC experiments probably aren't necessary to create it. The AI, which will soon become MUCH smarter than humans, if it doesn't kill us all, might be able to either (a) solve string theory and these other mysteries mathematically or in some way that doesn't involve a LHC, or (b) provide a way to conduct the experiment safely (e.g. something that neutralizes dangerous particles, or an easy/cheap way to get the collider into space or to another planet).<BR/><BR/>So you could imagine that the aliens probably followed one of these two paths, allowing them to zip around the universe with a million years' supply of popcorn enjoying other civilizations' LHC debacles as they happened.<BR/><BR/>In response to your other point, sadly it does seem that the French - I mean Freedom - are leading the Destroy the Earth and Maybe Even the Entire Universe Race, which is the new Space Race. If it's any consolation, at least they won't be around to enjoy their victory if they win.Nickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01439068253417267767noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1726857302330470257.post-90514835658315839052008-09-12T05:43:00.000-07:002008-09-12T05:43:00.000-07:00How did those proposed aliens avoid the fate of al...How did those proposed aliens avoid the fate of all the other civilizations they deride? They just got all this neato whizz-bang hyperrelativistic interstellar travel tech without doing their own planet-vaporizing high energy physics experiments? <BR/> Also, I find the economics pretty interesting. Hundreds of billions of dollars spent on massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons by the US and USSR... weapons which would only imperfectly destroy much of the biosphere even if set off simultaneously. And here the Swiss in cahoots with the reviled French have a nonzero chance of utterly destroying all matter in the Universe for a mere few billion Euro. I'm sure the damned Francophile lefties will be (erroneously as usual)touting this as an additional example of the superiority of the soft socialism of Western Europe.David A. Loboyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00560584664994095612noreply@blogger.com