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Dave Bacon is a theoretical ski bum who is also a pseudo 
Oh noes: Scientists Warn Large Earth Collider May Destroy Earth:
BATAVIA, IL--In October, Fermilab scientists joined a growing number of physicists around the world in warning that the Very Large Earth Collider--a $117 billion electromagnetic particle accelerator built to study astronomical phenomena by colliding Earth into various heavenly bodies--could potentially destroy Earth when it sends the planet careening headlong into Mars, Jupiter, or even the sun.Damn, and I'd just drawn up plans for the Incredibly Large Sun Collider (we can get ahold of the sun, so the joke goes, by traveling there at night.)
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Physicists at CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory, who underwrote the VLEC's construction with donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, agree that there are "some troubling variables" whenever attempting to launch Earth through the vacuum of space into a massive body of solid matter. Yet, they insist, the academic benefits of a planetary collision outweigh any risk of annihilating the Earth
Comments
Hmm - I'd email this to my work, but, considering that we had a teacher break down in her (I think it was her, maybe a him, though) class and had students panicking the last time, I'm afraid someone would think this was real.
Sad, that.
Posted by: Badger3k | December 16, 2008 1:54 AM
I'm sorry to see you go over to the dark side, Darth Bacon.
Posted by: Ian | December 16, 2008 6:58 AM
"(we can get ahold of the sun, so the joke goes, by traveling there at night.)"
This reminds me of a belief my grandmother developed when she was in her 90s. She became convinced that light-bulbs, the sun, etc., didn't produce light: they "sucked up" all the dark. when the sun went down it couldn't suck up our dark, so it went dark here. lights we turned on our lights then locally (she didn't use that term, but it is what she meant) they sucked up the dark. I think she would agree with your above-quoted comment, if she were still with us.
Posted by: dean | December 16, 2008 9:17 AM
Conceptually I don't have any problems with using the VLEC to study the universe. I have only one small observation. We could only do it once so the results would be singular, unreproducible, anecdotal, statistically meaningless.
Posted by: Art | December 16, 2008 10:12 PM
Intelligent Design advocates design a Young Earth Collider, to replicate conditions from the beginning of time -- approximately 7,000 years ago, when dinosaurs and humans walked together in the Garden of Eden.
It will smash Pronouns together, creating showers of sub-intelligent words, which may enable reconstruction of the original sound of creation, whose waves embedded in the structure of space-time are hypothesized to be (in some language): "Let There Be Light!"
The Intelligent Design advocates expect conclusive experimental disproof of the coherence of the Darwon, a hypothesized body from 1809 that began to emit evolutons in 1859, some 150 years ago.
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | December 17, 2008 10:02 AM