Lookout Below

Humans naturally have a short term view of things. We look forward to the weekend or our next vacation or maybe even retirement. But these events that may span our lifetime are just a blink of an eye in cosmic terms.

UniverseToday.com embarks on a journey to the end of time. Predictions include an end to humanity in about 10,000 years, end of life on Earth in about a half-million years, and destruction of our solar system (at left) in a few billion years. Eventually in about 10^100 years, the last black hole will evaporate, and all that will remain in the Universe are photons of radiation.

See the end at UniverseToday

Could a Welshman be responsible for bringing an early end to the universe?  As impossible as it sounds, that is what a U.S. federal court will have to decide in June.  Two Americans have filed a lawsuit to stop the £2 billion giant particle accelerator, which will begin smashing protons together this summer at Cern (The European Center for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland. 

Former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and botanist Luis Sancho claim the giant accelerator could spit out a strangelet, which could shrink our planet to a dense lump of “strange matter” or produce a black hole that would immediately consume the Earth and continue until the entire universe is destroyed.

But Dr. Lyn Evans, in charge of designing and building Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), said yesterday the doomsday scenarios cannot happen.  He said the colliding protons at Cern will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.  But since the Earth has been bombarded with similar cosmic rays for millions of years and is still here, Evans says we all have nothing to worry about.  Isn’t that what the CEO of Bear-Stearns said just 24 hours before the largest investment bank implosion in history?

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