Maven Mapper's

Imagine someone flips a switch, and within seconds or minutes planet Earth is consumed and swallowed into a black hole. Sound like something straight out of science fiction or a B movie.  Well it's that scenario that is prompting a number of people to send death threats to scientists are preparing to flip the switch and turn on a large Hadron collider.

This supercollider or particle accelerator, will be the world's largest, and some people feel that when launched a could trigger a worldwide cataclysm including the creation of a black hole that could destroy the planet.  The collider will be 27 km in diameter and scientists hope to unlock a few new mysteries of the universe with this massive tool.

However, despite its great promise, many people worldwide have protested the construction of the particle accelerator, believing it could end the world.  Many are fearful that the collider could spawn black holes, which they worry could devour the Earth.  The creators of the LHC, some of the world's foremost scientists, say such concerns are unfounded and convey a lack of understanding about the project.
According to Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University, the public animosity is so severe that American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has received death threats.  Professor Cox, typically sedate, adds irritatingly, "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t---. "

DailyTech - Large Hadron Collider to Go Online This Week Despite Death Threats

so this kind of raises the question, who is it that has oversight over scientists. Who is it that knows enough and has enough wisdom and given situation to confirm whether or not a scientific experiments could actually cause irreparable or life-threatening damage to planet Earth?

Unfortunately, anyone with half a brain knows that the human condition creates people even scientists, that do not always act in a way that is beneficial for the planet, for other people, or sometimes even for themselves.

I personally do not have enough information about this collider one way or another to know if it's a threat or not. From what I know about chemistry and physics, I suspect that it is not terribly threatening. That said, I have had a great deal of experience with Murphy's Law, and I know that things do go wrong and sometimes unexpected results to occur even with the most tried and tested tools. So who is to say that this particular tool might work as it is expected to work, or might fail miserably, or may even fail spectacularly.

When a developing country such as Iran attempts to create scientific experiments to help build up its own nuclear technologies, many people in Europe and the West turn a critical and harsh it to that endeavor. We do so often times because we do not trust the people controlling the tool. But we seem to turn a blind eye to ourselves when we do even your experiments with even less knowledge than a country like I ran that is simply following in the footsteps of many other countries.

We are breaking new ground, and don't really know where we will end up. We have hypotheses, but that doesn't always mean much, sometimes those hypocrisies can fail miserably and people will suffer the consequences, and sometimes those hypocrisies can fail and we can actually end up succeeding in strange and twisted ways, just ask just Christopher Columbus.

I don't know where this one's going, and I'm hoping for the best. That said, you might want to take pause next week is the flip is about to be switched on and consider your place in the universe. I'm not saying anyone's going to die or the plants going to implode or disappear, but it can't hurt for us to reflect on where we are today, and where we are going tomorrow before a few scientists handle some pool floats and throw us into the ocean of the universe.