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The unethical monstrosity that is the Large Hadron Collider

Adam P-S | 08.05.2008 23:26 | Globalisation | Technology

this is NOT an article addressing the issues that you normally find related to the LHC, i do not care about black holes or other cosmic dangers. This article addresses the very real threat to democracy that CERN poses through its latest experiment, an all to human threat.

This summer a 26 mile long machine called the Large Hadron Collider will be switched on under the Franco Swiss borders under the commission of CERN. The purpose of this machine is in order to unravel some of the deepest mysteries of our universe, using it we will be able to recreate the conditions that were present seconds after the big bang, allowing us to know how the universe was formed, we will also be able to explain why it is that subatomic particles are massless on the microscopic scale but seem to have mass on the macroscopic scale.
Many who have already read about this will know that there are associated dangers with this machine, dangers which some have deemed so worrying that even a law suit has been filed against CERN. These dangers regard the energy levels found within the Collider, which could potentially cause disasters such as micro black holes and tiny particles called strangelets, which could turn the whole earth in to nothing but a mass of strange matter.
But these things are of no worry to me. Mathematical predictions which according to everything we know about the universe should be almost certain show that the black holes should evaporate, similarly strangelets are a fringe view held by few scientists. The theory is actually laughed at by most of the scientific community. These things, whilst they seem worrying are shown
By mathematics to have a very small chance of actually happening.
No, the thing that worries me most of all about the LHC being switched on is what it will stand for. This experiment has the potential to destroy the earth, the odds of the earth actually being destroyed might be very small, but it still has the potential, therefore the scientists are essentially make a gamble, it might be a well informed one, but it is still a gamble.
What worries me so, what turns the LHC in to an ethical monstrosity is the fact that they are gambling with the earth itself. When was our planet the property of scientists to gamble with? I did not give my consent to have my life gambled with, but like it or not, within the next summer it will happen. What’s more this is no democratically decided motion; we haven’t simply lost out because we didn’t vote. This experiment is being carried out by a private enterprise; we have no choice but to accept it.
It is bad enough that the governments of the world gambled with our planet once before with the creation of the A-Bomb but the day that the LHC is turned on is the day that something far more terrifying happens. It is the day that private industry is allowed to gamble with the public’s life for nothing but financial gain and a greed for knowledge.
Would it have been too much to get United Nations consent first? I accept that even with United Nations consent it is hardly a democratic decision, but even then it would have still been something. But no, the governments of the world simply do not seem to be addressing this issue. Instead they stand by under facades of democracy, full in the knowledge that our lives will be gambled with.
Private industry has always found ways to exploit people, it has always in a sense gambled with the lives of people (need I remind folk of the nestle disaster?) Yet activation of the LHC is the most flagrant attempt yet. It is in clear view, yet there will be no public review, there will be no United Nations consultation and there will be no fine. No one will ask us whether we consent to have our homes
and our essences put in to this giant game of rullet. Where do we stop? This summer private industry will discover that it can get away with gambling the publics lives, and when they know they can get away with it, when will they stop? Our autonomy is not now bound simply by laws but has been ripped from us, simply because they can.
I accept that some governments in the world have indeed backed this machine, including the British government. However rather than showing the LHC has support does it not instead show that our government is not only letting this corporate rape on the rights of our lives happen, it is actively supporting it?
There will always be human progression, it is our instinct, but this summer the nietchszen morality present in our world as a result of that progression will really come through. This summer on a day that we do not even yet know a scientist some where will be playing the biggest game of cosmic cards ever played, you and me and every one we know will be in the middle of the table in this game. The question you should ask is, even if the scientist is renowned for playing good hands, even if he is poker world champion, are you quite happy to be his bet?

Adam P-S

Comments

Hide the following 15 comments

No risk

09.05.2008 03:53

No matter what stupid media would like you to belive there is no serious threat to earth possed by the LHC, even if a tiny blackhole was created:
1) the energy would disapate so as soon as it leaves the LHC it just goes back to being normal particles
2) even if it formed some stable blackhole, it would just drop down to the core of the planet and sit inside whatevers there (we dont actually know, maybe theres already a black hole there)

Rioting_pacifist


Not "Private industry"

09.05.2008 04:13

Thier simply not a private industry, you really couldn't be more wrong, in fact the entire article looks devoid of content. Its a good thing there is an internet that's free and open to discuss this sort of stuff on thanks to oh right CERN.

Rioting_pacifist


rioting pacifist...

09.05.2008 08:28

'even if it formed some stable blackhole, it would just drop down to the core of the planet and sit inside whatevers there (we dont actually know, maybe theres already a black hole there)'


erm...this comment does not really inspire confidence

thr


Human Nature

09.05.2008 10:03

It is human nature to take risks in the pursuit of greater knowledge and understanding. Think of all the great explorers, scientists and philosophers throughout human history. Where would we be if we didn't take risks? I don't think there is much of a risk personally far more chance that one of our satelittes or probes we have sent into space lands on an alien planet and triggers an intersteller war culminating in the destruction of our planet lol.

General Degenerate


Lunatic fringe?

09.05.2008 10:23

"similarly strangelets are a fringe view held by few scientists. The theory is actually laughed at by most of the scientific community."

But still you feel that we should have a massive worldwide vote to find out the opinions of people who know nothing about the subject and are completely unqualified to assess the danger? Fortunately there'll be plenty of people like you who've know a few buzz-words and can give them an incomplete and inaccurate view of the theories off which they can base their knee jerk reaction.

Also, where quantum mechanics is concerned, you need to be very careful when you say that something is "mathematically possible". It is mathematically possible that the sun will disappear tomorrow in a giant flash as all of it's matter is simultaneously transforms into photon pairs. That doesn't mean we should act as if it's in any way likely to happen.


@ thr: "erm...this comment does not really inspire confidence "

Don't worry, the reason we don't know is that, if there is already a black hole at the centre of the planet, it's so small that we can't detect it. If we can't detect it, it's because it's not having any effect on anything.

We're not talking something that is going to suck in the entire planet here. The smaller a black-hole is, the faster it's going to evaporate through Hawking radiation and we'll simply end up with the mass of the black-hole being transferred into radiation that will be harmlessly dissipate or be absorbed by the Earth. In fact there's a good chance that these micro black holes are being formed all the time in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays as there are similar energies involved and there are in fact cosmic ray observations that are looking for these black holes in competition with CERN.

In other words, we are in no more danger from the LHC than we are from the universe in general, but people have simply started paying attention now.



For perspective, when the Voyager probe was launched, many claimed that it was an unnacceptable risk as hypothetical aliens might be able to use the information to further their invasion plans.

MonkeyBot 5000


Its just a giant metal doughnut. BANG! Doh!

09.05.2008 10:25

Theres an article on the Hadron collider in march issue of national geographic. Am skimming through it, so check for yourselves. Think its a europe wide project, and altogether 50 nations have collaborated on. They are looking for the Higgs-boson, or God particle, which they think might sort of help carry the fabric of the universe together, bit like the idea of ether in spiritualism. Same difference. Different terminology for the same guesswork. Anyway, there is a theoretical risk of a black hole forming, not sure why its dismissed by saying "oh itll probably just dissolve again.." as I was under the impression black holes continue sucking all matter and even light into themselves for pretty much ever and ever once they start? Or did I just read too much Arthur C Clarke? Strangelets are among many silly pure math type theories which I don't understand but say things like its perfectly possible for fully formed independent disembodied brains to just pop up somewhere in the universe, a bit like the infinite improbability drive in THe Heart Of Gold :)
The most likely thing thats going to happen when they switch this machine on however, is that its just going to break. Its been being made for so long that if any parts do break, they probably won't have ready replacements because they won't make them anymore. You simply can't imagine how many parts this things got. Theres pieces of it that are there to sort the data into more manageable data, literally miles of cables, magnets (one of which has already failed) detectors, the scope for something to break is huge. And even if it works, apparently its going to be very hard to decide if they've found the God particle or not. Marvelous. So its a great big white elephant then. Still, given the crap kicked out of earth already, I don't really want scientists understanding the fabric of the universe, do you? When they switch it on, lets all think breaky thoughts at it...

shes the cats mother


Does "God"play dice?, "unscientific" experiments that endanger all life do need

09.05.2008 10:41

a moratorium now & we need a reinforced declaration of universal rights, backed by federated laws. This possible via democracy & a optimal consensus.
There are serious health & safety issues with nanotech WMDs & human chimera-eugenics-gm bill going to second reading on 12th www.hgalert.org.

A moratorium on dodgy science would help proper scientific experiments & get us out of global warming etc.
If corporations were in charge a lot of great scientists would come forward, at moment ,many "corporate" scientists are begining to look like freaks & or spaceballs.
Better Democracy & education is the main part of the answer

Green Syndicalist MEMBER IWW,ICA,


@ shes the cats mother

09.05.2008 15:26

"Anyway, there is a theoretical risk of a black hole forming, not sure why its dismissed by saying "oh itll probably just dissolve again.." as I was under the impression black holes continue sucking all matter and even light into themselves for pretty much ever and ever once they start?"

Not quite. A black hole will swallow anything that get's to close, but it also gives off Hawking radiation.

What we think of as empty space is a seething mass of particle/anti-particle pairs that spring into existence spontaneously. These normally anihilate each other straight away and the average energy/mass change is zero. Near the surface of a black hole, some of these particles are pulled in before they can cancel out with their partner. This left over particle can escape the area of the black hole and carry away energy/mass.

The black hole loses mass as it does this and essentially evaporates. The smaller the black hole is to begin with, the faster this evaporation will occur.


The problem with these things is that it takes decades for current theory to filter down to the level where a sizeable portion of the population have a working understanding. In the 16th century Galileo proposed that gravity accelerates eveything at the same speed and in 1971 the Apollo astronauts demonstrated this by dropping a hammer and a feather on the moon (no air resistance).

Almost 40yrs later, most people will say that the hammer will accelerate faster.

MonkeyBot 5000


moratoriums needed now & we need a reinforced declaration of universal rights

09.05.2008 23:21

a moratorium now & we need a reinforced declaration of universal rights, backed by federated laws. This possible via democracy & a optimal consensus.

A moratorium on dodgy science would help proper scientific experiments & get us out of global warming etc.
If corporations were in charge a lot of great scientists would come forward, at moment ,many "corporate" scientists are begining to look like freaks & or spaceballs.
Better Democracy & education is the main part of the answer

You can start by organising in your community & workplace & writing to what democratic reps we have at moment to vote for a moratorium on dodgy unsciencetific experiments immediately, so we can apply the science we know that works that can stop climate change etc

Green Syndicalist MEMBER IWW,ICA,


Absolute power corrupts absolutely

10.05.2008 11:59

If you are aginst the LHC, then get off your arse and stop it rather than asking for states to act responsibly. It is a huge, indefensible project easily sabotaged, but it is so potentially valuable that the elite will protect it at all costs from legal or political challenges. Tip: 1) Find the ring on the map. 2) Buy a metal detector to identify it. 3) Stop digging when you fall into a huge tunnel and someone starts firing quantum particles at you.

The project is far more likely to succeed than it is to destroy the world directly. It's success is equally scary. So our ruling elite suddenly have unlimited power - and not just the power to rip out fingernails, this is god-like power. 100 years ago humanity was expecting unlimited power or "electricity to cheap to meter". The people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were expecting this unlimited power to come their way eventually, they just didn't expect the form it would take. There were a few people who warned about atomic power in advance - HG Wells wrote a short story about a nuclear bomb hidden in a suitcase destroying London long before it became a tabloid reality.

Other sci-fi writers have since imagined the potential positive benefits of universally available free-power. Alistair Grays 'The History Makers' for example. Technology is amazing. 2000 years ago we were a species of aggressive, ignorant, fucked up individuals who slaughtered each other with swords and catapults. Now we are a species of aggressive, ignorant, fucked up individuals who possess technology that can destroy planets.

Knowing what you know today, if you went back in time would you kill young Einstein ?
It is a commonly employed truism that you can't 'uninvent' nuclear weapons. Two weeks after the last missile is decommisioned a new arsenal could be built. So, if we are serious about uninventing nuclear weapons it requires all written knowledge and designs and testing data to also be destroyed. Then you have to kill all the physicists ( not just the nuclear ones). Then you have to keep killing every child that shows an interest in the subject. Where is Pol Pot when you need him ?

Danny


Hmmm........

10.05.2008 12:38

The LHC is going to be used to confirm theories about what the universe is and how it acts (checking the existence of dark matter, testing some of the predictions of string theory, and trying to find the Higgs Boson), and I completely fail to see how any of this knowledge could be used to make any kind of weapon.

Spankey


sole goal is nuclear fusion - unnecessary and dangerous

10.05.2008 13:36

The sole goal of the LHC is to learn how to harvest nuclear fusion. I'm sure each individual physicist there will squeal with delight at each new scientific discovery but that isn't why CERN is funded. The fact it could destroy our species is worth noting especially when compared to the technical complexity of the project. The fact that it's prime goal is unlimited power - which in current society means unlimited power in the hands of a tiny elite - means I hope it fails with a whimper rather than a bang. I don't need fusion, I get all the power I need from wind, hydro and solar. And I really don't want anyone I've ever met having unlimited power, certainly not the fuckwits that are currently running the earth down.

When I was a teenage apprentice I designed a bit of expensive electronic kit that sold well, but I worked for a bluechip company so I earned nothing from it. It isn't that technical, it is just board with 16 relays on it and a high-speed specified interface, it is the interface that makes it techy and expensive and I just copied a previous one so I'm not bragging here. Relays are just electronic switches, low tech stuff. CERN bought my product though, lots of top end places did. I got pulled up by the CIA for it, as seemingly at the time the relays were a prohibited item to export to Eastern Europe. According to the CIA guy, all our Hungarian customers were paying huge amounts for my board only to desolder the relays and throw my board away. The Hungarians had the right idea. After that board I was put onto designing cables. They sold for hundreds of pounds, but still it was a punishment task. Senior people in my company told me that my board had been sold to both Chernobyl and NASA just before the first space shuttle tragedy. I'm fairly sure they were just winding me up though for a laugh, 90% sure, anyway, a faulty O Ring caused the Challenger disaster not my product. It has almost certainly since been replaced throughout CERN, it is a superceded technology. I just worry slightly about it being used in mission-critical systems. It has full certification, but it really shouldn't. The only technical qualification I had when I designed and tested it was a phyics higher that I got on appeal. The first protoype came back with the relays on the wrong side because I hadn't used CAD before and put the pin-out reversed. My design knowledge then was basically just 'trial and error'. I issued a product recall when I made them go on fire in the test lab. It turned out my multimeter was faulty not the boards, I'm just making the point even fully certified products should still be treated with suspicion. Equipment fails for so many reasons.

The space shuttle control systems had more lines of code than any other system at the time. All the electronics and computing press at the time were worried by this, as they knew success required software engineers and their minions to interface with chip designers and their minions - which rarely happened. Most techies asssumed it was a techy to blame for the space shuttle explosion, seriously it was the first thought of every engineer I knew. The realisation it was an o ring was initially a relief, and then we realised how all our systems are underpinned by relatively lo-tech stuff we just didn't have a clue about. A lot of geeks stopped thinking about the dangers of intergrating lots of systems and started learning how to make stuff from scratch.

If you think you can stop the LHC through direct action, then please do so. You are not going to stop it politically or through protests. Nuclear fusion is infinitely more motivating than any finite fossil fuel is, and CERN is one of the first exploratory rigs.
To summarise, the sole goal of the LHC is to learn how to harvest nuclear fusion. You don't need it, and you also don't want anyone else to have it.

Danny


LHC

10.05.2008 18:13

Two points.

1. The LHC has little or nothing to do with nuclear fusion. The physics of nuclear fusion are already very well known - the difficulty lies in the technology, and the LHC will contribute nothing at all to that.

2. Whilst democracy is all very laudable, there are times when it is not appropriate. Would you design a bridge whose stresses were determined by popular vote? Fly in an aircraft whose design had been determined 'democratically'?

If you want to know more about the LHC, you could start here:  http://www.lhc.ac.uk/the-big-questions.html.

xx


"because all science is evil..."

11.05.2008 14:48

Help! It's complicated science, it's big and I don't understand it! It must be EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVVVVVVVVIIIIL

Get a fucking grip, people.

I don't understand why some people like marmite. It's mathematically possible that the yeast in the marmite factory could mutate into a deadly planet-eating bacteria.
Therefore, we should all get a vote on whether to ban marmite.

oh Noes!


Burning plasma = fusion

12.05.2008 19:43

>1. The LHC has little or nothing to do with nuclear fusion. The physics of nuclear fusion are already very well known - the difficulty lies in the technology, and the LHC will contribute nothing at all to that.

If that was true it would close tommorow. I am not saying that the curent experiments are expected to produce fusion witine the next decade, I am claiming that the funding of the LHC is to fill in the gaps in our knowledge needed to achieve that. And that it is an unworthy aim given physicists contribution to the last century and the lack of need for fusion. I'd say you seem to be brusquely overestimating the theoritcal physicists case that 'the difficulty lies in the technology'. Speaking as a technician, I would like to point out if I can't build something for you then it is purely because you can't describe it to me well enough. If theorists understood the theory, then there would be no need for 'trial and error' experiments such as this. It is telling that the official CERN sites avidly mentions any 'cold fusion' research others do signalling that they are unsure of their theories.

Would you agree it is fair to say that CERN is funded to provide gaps in our knowledge, and that those gaps are currently stopping us from achieving fusion ?

Would you agree to say that most scientific research is directed towards areas of research that are expected to bring the greatest profit, as opposed to knowledge for the sake of it ? Physicists care about the next particle found. Their employers don't invest billions to make physicists happy - they invest expecting a return.

Why did the Burning Plasma Program Advisory Committee visited the LHC if the LHC is of no interest to fusion ? More importantly, why were they hosted ?

>2. Whilst democracy is all very laudable, there are times when it is not appropriate. Would you design a bridge whose stresses were determined by popular vote? Fly in an aircraft whose design had been determined 'democratically'?

A more appropriate question is if you were about to do an experiment that could kill everyone in the room, should a vote be taken as to it's potential worth or should it be the sole decision of the experimenter to risk everyones lives simply because you don't consider us intelligent enough to have a valid opinion ? That is the attitude of the slaughterman to cattle, and it is the attitude that leaves the souls of Hiroshima haunting every nuclear physicist. CERN admit there is a tiny chance that their experiment will kill me. It certainly won't benefit me.

Danny