Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Renowned Cosmologist Professor Martin Rees thinks a particle accelerator experiment gone awry could destroy the world – though there are good reasons to doubt the significance of this risk.
Earth could shrink if black hole experiments fail, astronomer warns
By Lauren Fruen, The Sun
October 2, 2018…
Professor Lord Martin Rees has said a “doomsday scenario” could see our planet reduced to 330 feet across if particle accelerator experiments mess up.
The respected astronomer made the outlandish warning in his new book, “On The Future: Prospects for Humanity.”
…
The Telegraph reports how Rees also claims “a black hole could form and then suck in everything around it.”
Lord Rees added: “The second scary possibility is that the quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed objects called strangelets.”
“That in itself would be harmless. However, under some hypotheses a strangelet could, by contagion, convert anything else it encounters into a new form of matter, transforming the entire earth in a hyperdense sphere about one hundred meters (328 feet) across.”
A third danger is that the particle accelerators could destroy the Earth by a “catastrophe that engulfs space itself,” according to the scientist.
…
Read more: https://nypost.com/2018/10/02/earth-could-shrink-if-black-hole-experiments-fail-astronomer-warns/
Fun though it is to contemplate these outlandish possibilities, there is a good reason to doubt whether any of these possibilities are a significant risk.
Every day the Earth is bombarded by untold billions of cosmic ray particles emitted long ago by violent distant cosmic events such as the formation of black holes. Many of the particles which strike the Earth are orders of magnitude more energetic than anything we are ever likely to produce. Some particles like the infamous “Oh-my-god” particle which struck Earth in 1991 with an energy of 3×10^8 TeV, hitting us at 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light defy explanation – we shall likely never find a way to produce particle energies of that magnitude (for comparison the Large Hadron Collider, Earth’s most powerful particle accelerator, produces particles at around the 4TeV range).
The point is the Earth has already been struck many times by particles of a very broad range of energies, including the range of energies used by particle physicists. If anything bad was going to happen due to a collision between particles of a specific energy, it should have already happened long ago when a cosmic ray of that energy struck the Earth.
On the other hand we have the Fermi Paradox – the mystery of the missing aliens. One possible explanation for why our universe seems so empty of intelligent alien life is that (almost?) all technological civilisations make a common mistake – they reach a level of technology which enables them to commit an act which results in their own destruction. One possible candidate for that act of self destruction is a high energy particle physics experiment which goes horribly wrong.
I haven’t read Professor Rees’ book, so for all I know he has an explanation for the cosmic ray flaw in the “particle experiment will destroy the world” theory. But for now I’m not going to be losing any sleep over this alleged risk.
Update (EW) Added the paragraph “The point is the Earth has already been struck many times…” to clarify the Cosmic Ray objection to the alleged risk of particle physics experiments.
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It’s interesting how these theories get media attention yet skeptics get nothing.
Apocalypse sells.
sycomputing
October 2, 2018 at 7:25 pm
I would have thought that Montreal, Chicago, New York, etc. once again under several kilometres of ice would be pretty apocalyptic!
Real problems don’t sell.
That is why apocalyptic porn, like dystopian SF, NAZI plots to take over the world from exile, rapture or 12th Imam based religious stories, and of course climate apocalyptic claptrap are so popular.
This sounds like the most merciful release from our present predicament.
sure beats Armageddon , nuclear war , or the anarchy which would follow a major financial crisis.
“I would have thought that Montreal, Chicago, New York, etc. once again under several kilometres of ice would be pretty apocalyptic!”
It is, but skeptics don’t sell that narrative, so they get nothing.
They were selling it back in the 1970s.
Climate change skeptics were selling apocalyptic predictions in the 1970’s? That doesn’t really make sense to you does it?
What am I missing?
I have my own theory on how the world will end. It starts with Brooke Shields ringing my doorbell. When I open the door, she looks deeply into my eyes and breathlessly says: “Oh! Please kiss me!” As I move in closer, the world ends!
I call it: A-pucker-lips Now!
(Stolen from a Wizard of Id comic decades ago.)
Why won’t the space aliens communicate with us? Well, why would they? All we do is pick fights over nothing and throw things at each other. I’d back away from that, too. Usually do.
Why does that guy look like the puppet from the Star Trek episode about the corbomite device that didn’t exist?
Whatever media attention this is getting is a repeat of the supposed risks being spouted in 2008-2010 or so when it was first started, and again a little later when its particle energy was fully ramped up to 3-4 TeV per particle in each beam (7-8 TeV per collision). I heard from a few different sources back when Usenet was still somewhat usable that this risked forming a black hole that would eat the Earth. It was restarted in 2015 with a particle energy of 6.5 TeV in each beam, 13 TeV per collision, the current world record according to the Wikipedia article on the LHC. Any news sources considering fears of world destruction by a black hole formed by the LHC seem to not be aware that this is old news.
It isn’t even a theory it is how a scientist whores himself to sell a book.
When pushed he has yet to give us a theory that says why the LHC will collapse the Earth into a round strangelet 100 meters in diameter. Which leads us to the above statement.
Particle accelerators give reporters a large hadron.
+1
lol
we have a thread winner 🙂
… gives new meaning to the phrase, “hadron collider”. I dated one of those once.
CERN have a powerful PR department.
CERN’s PR department is very particular.
Throw in the fact that there are 7 or 8 models for black holes because none of them really work or agree with the known universe, and you have the fairly reasonable assertion that back holes do not exist. Einsteim, Oppenheimer, and even NASA negate black holes.
Conservation of Rotational Energy is the problem. The high spin of a collapsing body would tear it apart before it got to even neutron star density.
It’s worse than that – see Hawking’s 2014 paper below. Incredible how their song carries on though.
This is the song that never ends, yes it goes on and on my friend. Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was, and they’ll continue singing it forever just because…This is the song that never ends, yes it goes on and on my friend. Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was, and they’ll continue singing it forever just because…This is the song that never ends, yes it goes on and on my friend. Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was, and they’ll continue singing it forever just because…This is the song that never ends,…
Steven Carruthers has decimated black hole Theory.
Will this occur before or after the world is destroyed by catastrophic human-caused global warming?
It’s the global warming that has caused these scientists not to think straight and thus they pursue high energy particle physics. It’s ALL due to global warming, even high energy physics, right?
Maybe, but’s m not so optimistic.
So… We 86 the precautionary principle when we’re intentionally jacking around with schist that actually could destroy life, the Universe and everything… but embrace it with fossil fuels even if it means freezing in the dark and starving… WTF?
You can’t destroy Capitalism by not using a particle accelerator.
No, we 86 the principle when we can spend other people’s money.
Thankfully neither the LHC nor CAGW is a threat to life, the Universe, and towels.
It will happen so fast, you would not feel a thing.
Like the Earth warming because of CO2..?
It would happen so fast we wouldn’t even know we did it.
Wasn’t that supposed to happen when they turned it on for the first time?
It was a finite probability… 😎
borowing from “The Simpsons”: ZERO. Zero is a finite number.
Indeed. You don’t need to go to an infinite probability to be in the realm of the ridiculous; any number greater than one will get you there. For some reason, some people have adopted “finite” when they’re trying to say “non-zero”.
It did. Having a female Dr. Who was so upsetting to the Universe it broke us out of the time loop. Causality of events do not necessarily follow their order of occurrence in the time stream.
Maybe the LHC wiping out the planet isn’t so bad after all.
Anything to get the SJW’s and PC police that have invaded the planet.
Proof of the Golgafrinchen B Ark!
Like with a cloth?
More like Honey, I Shrunk The Planet!
I shan’t be watching it, I’m no sexist or misogenist, but Dr Who has just has to be a bloke! 🙁
Just pretend he’s transgender.
..and Kristi called me weird. 😁
I wonder how they explain that the very first Dr. Who was an old gentleman who lived with his grand daughter (Susan?) who attended the local comprehensive school. She always called him Grand father.
Richard,
Denial.
The new non-judgemental Genesis begins with Madam and Eve.
It was also supposed to happen when the first atomic bomb was tested – 70 some years ago!
Possible world destruction was one of the fears that some people in physics expressed leading up to the first testing of the atomic bomb. It was hard to know where the chain reaction would stop. I still remember my father telling me about this uncertainty when I was about 5 years old!
Actually the fear was that the high heat from an atomic bomb would ignite an oxygen-nitrogen combustion and burn up the atmosphere. Alex Zucker was tasked in the early 50s to build a cyclotron and test this theory and obviously much more. Reports were that the cyclotron could project a beam of protons many feet into the air. This came first hand from Dr. Zucker when I met him in 1999 while he was an associate director at ORNL.
https://eteconline.org/news/retired-ornl-director-alex-zucker-died/
By comparison the SNS accelerator is producing a1 geV beam in 20kJ pulses.
A Russian physicist told me they used their particle beam rig to pull engineering chicks – aimed the beam 30ft above the local lake, took the girl for s romantic walk, spent the evening throwing frogs and pebbles into the beam.
Can’t help feeling maybe he was pulling my leg 😉
At least the report of the Manhattan project fear was true. The year was 1989, not 99.
Castle Bravo likely gave them a real scare running 2.5 times too big. Did’nt scare Sakharov though, who dialed back Tsar Bomba to 30% to protect the ionosphere.
I guess we found the missing heat.
++++++
Huh.
“On the other hand we have the Fermi Paradox – the mystery of the missing aliens. “
IMO the alien are probably about and fully understand that humans are just another semi-socialized lifeform that are not worth the effort of investigating.
My personal theory is they are all too busy playing computer games to bother with us. Look at all the problems modern society has had with addiction to games like World of Warcraft. When the VR can be piped straight into your brain, creating an immersive experience in which you can be absolutely anything you want to be, there will be a substantial drop in the number of people who are interested in interaction with the real world.
So that’s what really happened on Altair IV.
I thought it was monsters from the id.
Jim
And, presumably, also a substantial drop in the number of people given that VR sex is all in the mind.
The “Red Dwarf” and “Better Than Life” scenaro. And in a sense, the way we play scary story games and shape our lives around those stories….
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/n/grant-naylor/better-than-life.htm
It’s a blatant clue, blatant!
Man, that is soooo 2016. The game that rocks right now is Fortnite.
lol
Which is fine if you want to be murdered by 5 year olds.
Or they are the SJW gang, they seem pretty alien to me.
“On the other hand we have the Fermi Paradox – the mystery of the missing aliens. One possible explanation for why our universe seems so empty of intelligent alien life:”
One possible explanation for why “our universe seems so empty of intelligent alien life” is the same reason this planet “seems so empty of intelligent human life”.
Albert Einstein explained it thus:
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
I mean, look at all the people who voted for Al Gore, Obama, Hillary, and especially Justin Trudeau and Climate Barbie. These imbeciles have even bought into the global warming/climate change scam.
The great American philosopher George Carlin explained stupidity thus:
“Think of how stupid the average person is; and then realize half of them are stupider than that!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyifuNC0MT8 [Language]
One possible reason for the apparent absence of alien life is that we are in the middle of a narrow, ephemeral technology band. If there are intelligent aliens out there who haven’t yet developed a technological civilization, then obviously we aren’t going to pick up their radio broadcasts. If, on the other hand, use of the electromagnetic spectrum for communications is something that only moderately advanced civilizations (such as ours) do for a few hundred years until they discover something much better (and don’t ask me what it could be – how would I know?), then we aren’t going to detect those civilizations either.
For all we know, there could be several highly advanced civilizations out there, observing us closely and trying to decide whether we should be mercifully destroyed before we really screw up this corner of the universe. Just sayin’.
I lean to the idea they have moved up the spectrum from radio to gamma. Just look at the gamma ray burst conundrum. Now we are picking up fast radio bursts also .
Accelerating motors at light speed with Cerenkov radiation bursts might be their dieselgate. Who says aliens have no exhaust nor corruption? Its just at a much higher energy density.
Likely with such motors planets are off bounds for their “greenies”. A GRB when decelerating into this system would be catastrophic. For once alien greenies may be right!
Well EM radiation still only travels at the speed of light, and one might surmise that alien technological civilizations who have progressed beyond lower frequency transmission bands would have at one time used those frequencies, or similar ones. Since these civilizations would necessarily lie rather far from us, it would take quite some time for those transmissions to reach us. If we ever do hear them, we will be listening to their past. Such was the mandate for CETI, but with no success and waning interest it is essentially dead.
It also could be that those ancient radio waves from some nearer island have long since passed us by before we discovered how to detect them. But, that doesn’t mean we should abandon the lookout.
IMHO, an intelligent race, if they used radio or some other EMR, would for security reasons employ a wide-band scheme w/encrypted bursts that would look like random noise and require a key to decrypt.
Amen….
Unfortunately most people will vote for whomever promises them the most free stuff.
Not so anymore. Brexit and Trump are about jobs, work, production, manufacture, progress. People are sick of globaloney consumerism entertainment, fake economics, foisted upon them for decades – serfdom.
They live in other dimensions. This is patently a prison dimension with all humanity condemned to life sentences.
For prisoners no one wants to visit.
.
Well, if I were them looking down at the political absurdities going on here, I’d shake my multi-brain head in wonderment and sadness…..
They’re probably selling multi-armed Trump Vs Hillary Tshirts.
We study ants, but do the ants even know we are studying them? Are the ants aware of our existence or only of our effects?
Or they may have already been/are here. Oh I know, just made up stories to sell books, Venus sighting errors, canopy reflections, radar malfunctions, pilot/witness hallucinations and/or CIA disinfo…..(X-files???). Maybe even defective software in the “simulation”:
“UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record” by Leslie Kean
https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-Officials/dp/0307717089/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1538628612&sr=1-1&keywords=UFOs%3A+Generals%2C+Pilots%2C
What do you mean by “Where are the Aliens?”
Haven’t you been watching the news lately?
They take human form and vote Democrat.
“Where are the Aliens?” They are the Democrats.
Actually, they call themselves Dutchmen.
yeah but not, yeah but democrats vote even when they are dead, for upto another 100 yrs.
Yeah but no but, yeah but Dumbocrats vote even when they are dead, for upto another 100 yrs.
Athmospeher is larger collider than that. The ultra-high enenergy particles are very rare, but athmospehere is large so there are very many high energy collissons.
Black holes are where God divided by zero.
http://www.rockyhigh66.org/captions/Einstein.jpg
Scientists told us we had to give them loadsa money so they could “save the world” from plant food. We gave them loads of money and what do they do with it? Destroy the world. Tut, tut.
What a knucklehead.
But …….. we can prevent it happening by giving up fossil fuels and carbon pollution. Sacrifice your SUVs to save the earth! We have only six weeks before we reach the tipping point, so start freezing in the dark NOW.
Well, it’s all got to end sometime.
So we can give up trying to influence “Climate” it’s not worth the effort when it will all be gone in a moment, just like that!
(And we can go on using plastic bags .)
“Oh we’ll all go together when we go” – Tom Lehrer
Gawd, I miss Tom Lehrer! 😀
Main stream Physics started all this madness around the time of Einstein who invented General relativity theory and Schwarzschild who solved the exact equations for same in 1915. Since then, concepts like black holes ,dark energy, and dark matter have been developed mathematically from the theory. Physicists fell into the same trap that climatologists have fallen into, except that physicists did it long ago. The major difference is that physicists use mathematics as their model and climatologists use climate computer software as their model. Both fall short of the real world. Mathematics is only an approximation of the real world and computer climate models are a much worse approximation of the real world. Physicists have to learn to be humble and say I DON’T KNOW when asked a question. The scientists who believe in dark energy and dark matter say that they can’t conceive of any other reason why the universe is accelerating its expansion (latest research even questions this) ; so that dark energy and dark matter must be the cause. Sound familiar? I believe that black holes will eventually be found to be impossible. Curvature of spacetime, gravitational waves, and Higgs boson particles are also skeptical in my book. And the biggest scam of them all is the BIG BANG with its non existent cosmic background radiation. No I’m not a creationist. Just the opposite. I am an atheist and true skeptic. Science has lost its way and we are doomed to fruitlessly chase our way down rabbit holes like black holes. LET US GET BACK TO THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD . If we cant reject the null hypothesis with 5 or 6 sigma tests, then let us admit we don’t know, instead of inventing concepts through mathematical constructs and computer modelling.
I think GOD will turn out to be the equation of all equations.
The equation that explains everything.
There can never be a “theory of everything” in a cosmos of free agents. Life, liberty and endless pursuit of reason is a god-given gift, not permission granted from some committee, nor academy.
Newton was not a scientist, rather the last alchemist, according to biographer Maynard Keynes. Newtons infamous “I don’t hypothesize” tallies with his unbelievable alchemy, boxes full of papers.
Are there free agents? How would you know?
If freedom is not builtin from the get-go, how could we be free to pursue happiness? Not to say that may be difficult, but freedom simply does not emerge spontaneously from an algorithm, no matter what von Hayek or Newton might conjure up.
“I think GOD will turn out to be the equation of all equations.”
Or not.
“The equation that explains everything.”
Or nothing.
As particles approach the speed of light dies not the mass increase exponentially??
Hmm…
Why did you skip over the evidence for black holes?
And dismissal of all models is not justified by the facts.
A lot of people take the position that if they don’t understand something, it doesn’t exist.
A volcano has erupted on the Indonesian island hit by an earthquake and tsunami five days ago.
Mount Soputan in North Sulawesi province starting spewing ash 6,000 metres into the sky on Wednesday morning.
“Not another one” said Brenda (a very long SS min due)
Obviously due to Global Warming!
/sarc
So is this the punishment for insufficient female Physicists at CERN?
>>
. . . they (the missing aliens) reach a level of technology which enables them to commit an act which results in their own destruction.
<<
These aliens must have come up with stupid ideas like “stopping climate change” and destroyed their planets in the process.
Jim
I have it on good authority that in the alt universe in which Hillary Clinton won the election, it immediately collapsed into a stranglet upon finishing her inaugeration oath.
Whew, boy did we dodged a big bullet.
http://www.rockyhigh66.org/captions/hillary_sniper_fire.jpg
It is not the “oh-my-god” (Higgs boson) particles that hit the Earth atmosphere constantly, but Auger particles which range in energy from 10^18 to 10^24 electron-volts (or 10^6 to 10^12 TeV). They are rare, only app. 2 per square km per century, but the surface of Earth’s atmosphere being app. 510 million square km, that makes about 9,5 every minute. For the last 4,5 bil. years, of course.
Incidentally, essentially the same argument was advanced against the Brookhaven accelerator (RHIC) back in 2000.
miso
There are three degrees of freedom in the Fermi paradox:
The degree to which beings learn to control their environment.
The degree to which beings learn to control themselves .
The degree to which beings learn to control each other.
Currently Earthlings are far better at controlling each other than themselves or their environment.
And they ain’t that good at that, nutha!
Douglas Adams’ :
“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’ the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question ‘Where shall we have lunch?”
A fun calculation I made figured if you spat OMG protons out of a million-ton spaceship to accelerate it, at 1g, to, and decelerate it from, lightspeed over the course of a couple of years, then you’d only need 48kg of hydrogen propellant.
Not certain, but you should check your math.
Could easily be correct. 5he problem is the energy required to accelerate the hydrogen so close to lightspeed.
Due to time dilation and length contraction such a drive could reach any star in the universe and return in a human lifetime at 1 g acceleration. No warp drive required unless you wish to return to earth time. Still it is an interesting question why the physics works for a human lifetime but not a dog or cat for example. Long odds for coincidence.
Any star in the visible universe.
Additional aspects of 1 g accereration travel are shown here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_acceleration
Another anthropic ‘coincidence’ is the value of c/g (=0.97 year).
That implies that communication with a spaceship that travels with a 1 g acceleration from the Earth is affected after 1 year. Then the signals from the Earth cannot reach the spaceship anymore, but signals from the spaceship can still reach the Earth.
Yes, that would require an antimatter fuelled cyclotron many orders of magnitude better than CERN. Another issue is that interstellar particles want to fuse with the spacecraft atoms above 0.1c, so you have to somehow plasmarize and deflect everything in your path.
Trifling matters for the wrench monkeys though.
I believe you have forgotten to account for increased mass as speed increases, as well as the decreased acceleration from each particle as the craft as speed increases.
You’re referring to the increase in mass seen by the stationary observer, who would also see a proportionate mass increase in the propellant. These things would kick in closer to lightspeed.