I tend to believe that the LHC will provide us with the technology to leap into interstellar space. At least it will enable us to have unlimited bandwidth for aggravating each other on the intertoobs…

Jim

They will claim it’s invested in science, but – and admittedly in summarized fashion only – fact is it’s invested in their own tendentious/ideological use and abuse of truer forms of science, and it’s invested in their own attempts to traduce those who oppose them on better scientific grounds. So, ultimately, their faith is vested fully in themselves; in critical areas they studiously eschew self-criticisms and self-reflection at points where doing so would begin to jeopardize their heavily ideological/scientistic view of the world, their weltanschauung or however it might be better characterized.

Despite the romanticized view of certain delusional types, farming methods in elder days were breathtakingly wasteful and inefficient compared to those of current days. This is NOT simply that we soak the plants and the soil with evil chemicals to force plant growth, but that we employ a far more penetrant awareness of ecologic relations among plant, soil, atmosphere, hybridization and cultivational schema. Yes, ancient farmers had a more intimate knowledge of *their* world, but that intimacy comprised the inefficiencies and compromises which they had arrived at empirically. In other words, they were intimately familiar with methods that worked for them, in their time, with the tools they had.

“Slash and burn” is a perfectly reasonable system for a wilderness in which humans are a minor component of the ecology. The forest can recover from having a patch reduced to ash, sustaining the agricultural plantings for a village of a few families for a couple of decades, then grow back in a couple of generations. Those families would meanwhile have been gathering foods from the surrounding jungle and presumably dropping their wastes in the immediate area of the land they’d cleared, providing nutrition for eventual forest regrowth. They were part of the ecosystem, right? When they moved on, the forest would grow again, and the system remained in equilibrium.

It’s not insane to be concerned about new technologies. such as the particle colliders. Arthur Holly Compton, one of the scientists supervising the Manhattan Project, alluded to the concern that the ignition of a fission bomb might initiate a chain-reaction in the atoms of the atmospheric gasses that would propagate and spread around the world. Edward Teller had made the original speculation, but after Hans Bethe did the maths, those scientists who had a solid working knowledge of radiation at that time realized that the energies released by a fission bomb would not be sufficient to affect the stability of atomic nuclei of the surrounding atmospheric gasses, because *that* is after all the critical issue. If the nuclei of atmospheric gasses were that fragile, we would be living in a very different sort of universe.

By the same token, if we are in danger from the effects of sub-microscopic black holes that might be formed by the collision of subatomic particles in the latest supercollider, that danger has existed since the advent of the earliest experiments directing opposing streams of subatomic particles on collision paths, or for that matter, since the beginning of the present universe. After all, we exist in a constant flux of high-energy cosmic rays, which are the highly-accelerated particles hurtling through space after being ejected from stellar cataclysms. Those particles exhibit energies higher than anything human science has been able to conjure, and over the four billion year lifetime of this planet, there is at least the possibility that some of those have collided to form microscopic black holes near enough to be captured by Earth’s gravitational field.

In ANY case, gravitational attraction is at any scale inversely proportional to the square of distance from the CENTER of an object’s mass. Compressing two subatomic particles into a single particle – “black hole” or NOT – does not somehow magically increase the gravitational force the combined masses are able to exert!

Consider that (a) the mass of a black hole – and thus its gravitational attraction to other masses – cannot be greater than the sum of the original particles; (b) gravitational attraction varies at all scales inversely as the square of the distance between the centers of the masses; (c) at the scale of subatomic particles, electrostatic forces and the strong and weak nuclear attractive forces vastly overwhelm gravity as determinants of particle interactions.

Any newly created subatomic-sized black hole is only going to be able to accumulate mass from neighboring particles when it comes within a spectacularly small distance from any matter it approaches. Sub-atomic particles are calculated to take up a miniscule fraction of a percent of the volume of an atom. That means that relative to their sizes, subatomic particles exist in an environment in which they are separated from each other by relatively enormous distances. So
the probabilities of an infinitesimal black hole approaching other particles closely enough to engulf additional mass is astronomically small.

Besides all that, Cosmologist Stephen Hawking indicates that subatomic black holes are most likely to “evaporate” relatively quickly, as they lose energy and mass by sucking in occasional halves of matter-antimatter pairs that are thought to seethe in and out of existence at the smallest scale of the present reality. The un-captured particle essentially carries away mass and energy from the tiny black hole, which shrinks both in radius and mass until it finally dwindles to nothing. (Black holes above a certain mass would not suffer this fate because their gravitational field would capture both members of the matter-antimatter pair!)

So, We’re SAFE, guys!

http://www.forgottendetroit.com

The city of Detroit is being reclaimed by the wild in a demonstration how liberal policies destroy the civilization of man.

Maybe we should all leave, and we’ll find out who will take over.

But alas, you guys are taking yourselves awfully seriously, and evidently are in a highly suggestive state.

It would be a pity for the Face on Mars to become overly commerialized, like too much Mayo on a Hoagy.

I don’t think we’ll care too much about that if it’s not our descendants who are part of that “intelligent and technological life.”

In some sense I agree with you, or not. It doesn’t really matter. Yes, if humans degrade the environment to the point that we go extinct, it’s possible that the descendants of lizards or gobys will evolve intelligence and technology in 100 million years or so. I suppose the percent of my DNA in those intelli-lizards and intelli-gobys will be pretty much the same as the percent of my DNA in the Human descendants that might otherwise exist in 100 million years, but it doesn’t feel quite the same.

In the end I’d rather that we left the primeval forests and rain forests to our descendants, rather than the faux jungles that you seem to thing are just as good.