The World Is Ending (or at Least a Website)

One RSS feeds I subscribe to is the one at http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/. I mean, if the world is going to end, I certainly want Google reader to be the first to tell me. But today's RSS update is, instead of the traditional "no", different:

Bye bye everyone. This domain is not being renewed. It's been fun.

Which means that soon when you check www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com, you may not get an answer. Which may or may not mean the LHC has destroyed the world (oh noes!) Or it may just mean that your going to find a web page filled with spam from a domain name squatter. Which is kind of the same thing, I guess.

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You may have noticed an ad running on scienceblogs which says "Has the LHC destoyed the Earth?" If you click on it you find a webpage that says in big letters simply "NO". What's up with that? Check out the webpage source for the page (http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/). Update 9/12/08…
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This travesty has been taken care of, and the website will live on :). After all, the LHC might actually (*gasp*) turn on one of these days, and then, where would we be without this awesome website?

Claire: I keep track of both :) Redundancy is useful for the end of the world, but I guess it's only an error detecting code.... !

Hi Dave,

The page is not merely a "NO". You should check the html code of the page.

Among other things, there is this message:

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http://scienceblogs.com/pontiff/2008/09/lhc_ad_beware_bears.php

By Daniel de Fran… (not verified) on 10 Sep 2009 #permalink

Hmm, the HTML message did not appear. Well, just go there and see the code.

By Daniel de Fran… (not verified) on 10 Sep 2009 #permalink

Alright, I will try again:

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"Anesthetized monkeys exposed to 25,000
ppm or 50,000 ppm [of freon] for 5 minutes had [cardiac] [arrhythmia]s
including [tachycardia] and decreased contractility (U.S. EPA 1983)"

In their paper, Coleman and de Luccia noted:

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never
been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate
ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of
nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible,
so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic
comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the
new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some
structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been
eliminated.
The second special case ... applies if we are now living in the
debris of a false vacuum ... This case presents us with less
interesting physics and with fewer occasions for rhetorical excess
than the preceding one.

S. Coleman and F. De Luccia (1980). "Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay". Physical Review D21: 3305.

the crab always wins; it makes the baby syntacticians cry.

this page is now tail-recursive: http://scienceblogs.com/pontiff/2008/09/lhc_ad_beware_bears.php

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This is pretty much the content of that page.

By Daniel de Fran… (not verified) on 10 Sep 2009 #permalink