funsec mailing list archives
Re: hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet
From: Gary Warner <gar () askgar com>
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2008 06:29:12 -0500
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 My daughter's classmates were all freaked out that the world was going to be destroyed this week. I calmed her down. "They are only running tests in the LHC this week. The first collision isn't even scheduled until October 21st. THAT'S when your friends should panic." That's really a much better thing. Nobody knew it was time to panic until the day before this time around. But now they have almost a month to make their peace with God. Actually, I gave them something better to do with their panic . . . Did anyone read "Flash Forward" by Robert J. Sawyer? The book starts with: =============== Day One: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 A SLICE THROUGH SPACETIME . . . The control building for CERN's Large Hadron Collider was new: it had been authorized in A.D. 2004 and completed in 2006. The building enclosed a central courtyard, . . .. Lloyd was director of the collaborative group of almost a thousand physicists using the ALICE ("A Large Ion Collider Experiment") detector . . . they were attempting to recreate energy levels that hadn't existed since a nanosecond after the Big Bang, when the universe's temperature was 10,000,000,000,000,000 degrees. In the process, they hoped to detect the holy grail of high-energy physics, the long-sought-after Higgs boson, the particle whose interactions endowed other particles with mass. =============== The plot of the book is that at the moment the LHC does its first collision, everyone on earth has their consciousness projected 20 years into the future, and they can "see" and "experience" what their future self is seeing and experiencing. For about two minutes. Then they are back in the present, with that future knowledge providing just about everything that's needed for a really cool sci-fi social experiment novel. (Oh, at CERN they are running Windows 2009 in the book...not linux) - ----------- I explained this plot to my daughter and she and her friends are now planning what they are going to look for and do during their two minutes in the future -- unfortunately that decision was made in the book by your FUTURE self. You had no control over it. Some things on the list so far . . . - see if you're in bed with someone and learn their name - walk out the door and see if there are Papparazi in your roses - find a newspaper and check for the highest value stock _-_ gar -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIyQEIg79eYCOO6PsRAh2eAJ9yXrUvoFECvd7fDCj5wqtB3mtEqgCeMb9w 9WSWvctHM1DB0iwKcn+e1z8= =uo/W -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
Current thread:
- hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet Gadi Evron (Sep 10)
- Re: hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet Gary Warner (Sep 11)