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.

Particle colliders give me a "large hadron"

So, if you haven't checked your calendar recently, today is September 10, which means that at 7:32 Greenwich Mean Time, they switched on the ol' LHC, which if you haven't religiously followed this blog or read particle physics journals over the last few months (and if you haven't, come on, what's wrong with you?) stands for the Large Hadron Collider. That means this huge atom smasher has now begun firing up for its first attempts to destroy the earth find out what matter is made of.

So, what is it, you may ask?

Well, "it" is a gender-neutral pronoun used in the English language to refer to a previously specified object - but that's not important right now. Let's stay on topic.

The Large Hadron Collider, on the other hand, is a few things:

1) A 17-mile-diameter series of tubes, a lot like the internet, except it's used to smash tiny atoms and subatomic particles together at relativistic (near-light) speeds.

2) The name of a porn video I saw a long time ago, I think.  It "had Ron" Jeremy in it (zing!).  Oh wait...no...that was "Large Hardon Collider."

3) Something that is fairly likely to destroy the world, and even has a small probability of destroying the entire universe. Oh, yeaahh!

Below are a couple of photos of this bad boy.  On the left is an aerial shot of the border between France and Switzerland where the big ring is located.  On the right is the belly of the beast itself: a big ol' tube lined with supercooled superconducting magnets used to accelerate protons, lead ions, and the like to ridiculous speeds.

Eventually, this huge device will be used to cause "large hadrons," which are actually extremely small, to collide at near light speed.  When these collide, the hadrons should break apart, releasing particles, energy, and other things that the LHC will try to detect.  One of the main theories physicists are aiming to prove is string theory: the idea that matter, light, gravity, and everything else is composed of subatomic strings that vibrate in 11 dimensions.  Duh!  Do we really need an experiment to tell us that?  What else could all that stuff be composed of other than 11th dimension vibrating strings, Captain Obvious?

Anyway, when the collisions start happening, the scene at the LHC might look something like this:

What will the LHC find?  Likely candidates include the Higgs boson (which may or may not be the reason matter has mass), supersymmetry (which would give us insight into the validity of many quantum theories), dark matter, micro black holes, new subatomic particles, and other things nobody guessed.  Of course, despite all the theories, nobody really knows exactly what will come out of the LHC.  For all we know, it might even produce some of this crazy stuff.

The ridiculous thing is that a lot of scientists actually believe the LHC could produce micro black holes.  This is no reason to worry however, they say, because these black holes will theoretically evaporate via Hawking radiation before they can grow to any considerable size.  Theoretically.

Otherwise, something like the following might play out...

Scientist 1: "Oh no!  It's a black hole!"
Scientist 2: "Not to worry. It's only a micro black hole. It's not stable and will evaporate in less than a second. Even if it doesn't evaporate, it will escape the earth's gravity. Even if it doesn't escape the earth's gravity, it will take millions of years to accrete enough matter to kill us.  M'kay?"

Scientist 1: "Got it.  Let's keep smashing hadrons."

Scientist 1: "Oh no! The black hole got bigger!  It's going to kill us all!"
Scientist 2: "Whoopsy daisy! Looks like I put a decimal point in the wrong place or something.   I was hopped up on a bunch of Vicodin for my bad back the week I came up with those formulas.  My bad!"
Scientist 1: "I'm going to kill you!"
Scientist 2: "No, the black hole is going to kill me, and it's also going to kill you. Sorry about that, chief!"

Scientist 1: "Stop calling me 'chief,' guy!"

Scientist 2: "Stop calling me 'guy,' chief!"
(black hole consumes the entire planet)

Alien 1: "Awesome! The poor bastards never saw it coming!"
Alien 2: "Come on, dude. That ended exactly the same way as 'Large Hadron Collider 16: Planet Gzyxqiofn of the Crab Nebula.' So unoriginal. This series is really starting to circle the drain."

Alien 1: "Well, so much for Earth.  I say good riddance - that place was a real dump.  I'm going to miss 'Buffalo This' though."

Alien 2: "I'm not. That guy was an idiot. Hey, let's get out of here before that black hole spaghettifies us."

Alien 1: "Oh yeah, good idea."

Now I've already heard people say things today along the lines of, "Phew, we're still here!  Looks like there was no reason to worry about the LHC after all!"  Not so fast, Einstein.  It wasn't simply turning on the machine that was supposed to destroy the earth.  They haven't even started colliding particles yet and won't begin doing so for at least a few weeks.  Even then, they won't be using the full power of the machine; the collisions will get increasingly powerful through the rest of 2008 and into 2009.  Every time the power is ramped up, we enter a new and uncharted realm of particle collisions with uncertain consequences.  In the case of a strangelet disaster or vacuum metastability event, we'll find out that something has gone wrong immediately, and by "find out that something has gone wrong," I really mean "all die."  In the case of a stable micro black hole that gradually eats away at the earth, we may not know about it for months, years, or much longer.  So it could be a long, long time before we conclusively know the answer to the big question: Will the LHC kill us all?  If it's any comfort to you, I've got $500 that says it doesn't.

Welcome to the jungle.