Black Holes

Good morning, friendly readers. It's another late night (early morning) for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is this: since about three forty five this afternoon I've been a tad preoccupied with the thought that the world might end in about a month.

If your brain is of a sciency bent, you listen to NPR, or you read National Geographic, then you've probably heard about this huge thingamagumy called the Large Hadron Collider they are building out at CERN, an underground particle physics lab in Switzerland.

Basically this thing is a huge 17 mile wide device ten years in the making. Its sole purpose is to slam particles of matter together at incredible speeds so that scientists can...well, watch it happen I guess. Which is all groovy. I was down with it. I'm always up for some particle physics in action. But then I heard a scientist on NPR today talking about how one of the experiments they would be doing out there is using the LHC to create miniature black holes.


Okay, so obviously I'm not a scientist. Not even close. And this guy had lots of good scientific reasons why they wouldn't destroy the world by creating black holes under the ground in Geneva. But sometimes things just feel like a bad idea, don't they? Doesn't this just sound like we are asking for trouble as a species?
I can't help but get the sensation sometimes that one day a highly advanced alien civilization will come across our little smoking carcass of a planet and say "well, what the crap were they expecting? They starting screwing around with black holes!"

That all being said, I'm more irritated by all this than genuinely concerned. Is there a chance that some Swedish scientist will flip a switch and suck all of humanity into a lump the size of a grapefruit? Yes. But, mathematically speaking, there is ALWAYS a chance of that happening. There is a chance I'll die from choking on a gopher tortoise tomorrow, there is a chance I'll slip on yogurt and get my face stuck in the garbage disposal. These are fears that we all must live with.

No, what really irks me is that the world might end while I'm at work, of all places. And it might happen so quickly! I imagine it would be something like this.
So on my drive home today I got to thinking...maybe I should live the next month as if the world really is going to end. Worst case scenario: the Swiss beat the one in a hundred million trillion cazillion odds and kill us all, in which case I've told everybody in my life everything they need to hear and lived a satisfying final month. Best case scenario: I tell everybody in my life everything they need to hear, live a satisfying and fulfilling month, and some scientists get to watch an extremely expensive machine smash little bits of stuff into other little bits of stuff at high velocity with absolutely no ill effects.

Heck, maybe we should ALL be living like the end was near ALL the time. As hallmarky as it sounds...it might not be a bad way to go through life.

So I'm going to try it. If I say weird things, act in a strange way, tell you that I love you, tell you that I don't, or say or do anything out of the ordinary, don't worry. Don't fret.

It's only because the world is ending.

Possibly.

--A--