Life Imitates Spiderman/Switzerland Sucks! [Jack M.]

With great power comes great responsibility.

Words to live by, even in, and perhaps because of, these ever changing times.

Of course, I always thought "Excelsior!" and "Make Mine Marvel, True Believers!" were words to live by too. They just never seemed to catch on.

Why am I writing about perennial Stan Lee catchphrases?

Because he died, and this is a tribute post.

Psyche!!! Stan the Man isn't dead! Boy, for a minute I bet all of you were running to your closets to set up your X-Men shrines and don your Spiderman underoos.

Anyway...I mention Mr. Lee because it appears that one of his greatest villians

Dr. Otto Octavius (better known to you morons as Dr. Octopus) has been put in charge of the world's most powerful supercollider. The supercollider is scheduled to come on-line in 2007.

Now then, what could possibly go wrong with Dr. Octopus running a supercollider, you ask?

Find out after the jump.

Oh I dunno....how about the entire world being destroyed by black holes created by this thing?

From the article:

Scientists may be able to generate a black hole as often as every second when the world's most powerful particle accelerator comes online in 2007.

This potential "black hole factory" has raised fears that a stray black hole could devour our planet whole.

A black hole factory? Man that would suck. Heh.

Why, if you were caught in one you would collapse into a singularity! Are you reading this Insty?

What are the chances of Dr. Octopus succeeding with his brilliant plan?

But the chance of planetary annihilation by this means "is totally miniscule," experimental physicist Greg Landsberg at Brown University in Providence, R.I., told LiveScience.

Oh. Like rad, gnarley and totally tubular too. I'm liked so totally stoked that the Tahoe running these experiments talks like Jeff Spicoli. I feel so much better now.

Why are they doing this? Actually, for some pretty cool and interesting reasons. Namely, they want to study all sorts of things relating to extra dimensions, radiation, missing mass, etc. Science crap that I'm too tired to summarize. Go read the damn article for yourself if you want to know.

There is this comfort though for those of you who are worrying about the imminent destruction of the planet by runaway black holes (created during the George W. Bush administration, so his fault too, unless of course George Bush hates black holes, in which case it's Cheney's fault):

CERN spokesman and former research physicist James Gillies also pointed out that Earth is bathed with cosmic rays powerful enough to create black holes all the time, and the planet hasn't been destroyed yet.

"Still, let's assume that even if Hawking is a genius, he's wrong, and that such black holes are more stable,"...

"Even if you produced 10 million black holes a year, only 10 would basically get trapped, orbiting around its center," Landsberg said.

However, such trapped black holes are so tiny, they could pass through a block of iron the distance from the Earth to the Moon and not hit anything. They would each take about 100 hours to gobble up one proton.

At that rate, even if one did not take into account the fact that each black hole would slow down every time it gobbled up a proton, and thus suck down matter at an even slower rate, "about 100 protons would be destroyed every year by such a black hole, so it would take much more than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth material," Landsberg concluded. "It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."

Is it just me or did Landsberg sound just a trifle...disappointed/frustrated... in that last sentence?

Anyway, If I have learned anything from Spiderman, and I have, it's that runaway experiments that threaten to destroy the Earth can always be stopped by simply dumping them in a lake.

So I might want to cancel any plans you have to visit Lake Geneva in 2007 if I were you.

After all, if Doc Ock isn't stopped Lake Geneva might yet become just the latest in a long line of things that suck out of Switzerland.

Excelsior!

posted by Ace at 04:20 AM

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