A court in Hawaii will be hearing a lawsuit claiming the agencies building the large hadron collider, expected to go online in May after 14 years and $8 billion worth of construction, haven't done enough to ensure the collider won't produce a tiny black hole which will swallow the earth. In the event of the unthinkable, however, this author predicts that we will not be inconvenienced for longer than a few microseconds.
Luckily there are people already thinking ahead to a course of action should a black hole ever come looking for us.
2 comments:
Actually it isn't clear what court this will end up in, since Hawaii wouldn't seem to have jurisdiction over a mostly EU project that's located in France and Switzerland. BTW, this (LHC lawsuit) is exactly what I was going to post about, dang it! Personally, I think we'd learn quite a lot from slipping through a black hole. It would either answer a lot of questions or solve a lot of problems.
Part of the sketchiness of this thing is that it is being filed in Hawaii, so CERN is unlikely to show up. There's nothing in the article that indicates the plaintiffs have considered filing in a different venue. The other three agencies named in the suit, though, since they are American agencies might have to show up. The DOE and NSF are both US federal agencies.
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