(no subject)
You know that special person? You've got one- everyone does. They might not necessarily be the person you share your bed with at night, your nearest and dearest. They might be a friend for whom your love is unrequited. They might be the one that got away all those years ago. They might be the mythically beautiful person you see on the bus every morning. You might never have even met them. But there's someone, somewhere who gets your heart pounding and your mind racing. Someone who does for you the best thing anyone can do for another person- they make you feel, for want of a better word, funny.
Think of that person. Now, tell them how you feel. Go on. Do it. Find the way to track them down and let them know, right now, that there's someone in the world for them and that someone is you. Tell them now, I'll wait here for you. And be quick about it.
Because you're about to die.
The harbinger of your impending doom, like so little else in human history, comes from Switzerland and goes by the rather bland name of 'The Large Hadron Collider'. Essentially, it's a 17 mile circular tunnel 100 metres below the Franco-Swiss border which is currently in the process of being cooled to -271.25 degrees centigrade. When this is done, the scientists who run it will then start firing beams of protons in opposite directions round the tunnel and make them crash into each other, thereby replicating conditions that prevailed within a few millionths-of-a-second of the Big Bang. And the reason they're doing all this is to test their current model of particle physics which, as they put it themselves, "is known to break down at a certain energy level".
Let's go through that again. A bunch of men in white coats realise that a very important theory of how absolutely everything fits together at the most minute level breaks in certain extreme conditions. 'Extreme conditions' being, in this case, an alternative way of saying 'The Big Bang'. They therefore have decided to recreate those exact same conditions or 'Big Bang' in a great big underground tunnel and just see what happens. Oh, and it'll all happen at light-speed.
Little wonder then that more than a few people are a tad worried that, since no-one knows what's going to actually take place, it's entirely possible that the experiment will do something like creating a black hole and swallow the Earth into itself.
The scientists at the colider themselves state that this is ludicrous as "there is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the Large Hadron Collider", which is frankly a bit rich from a bunch of chaps who are basically trying to demonstrate that one of their main theories doesn't work properly.
It's worth getting worried about what might happen when the collider goes online as boffins (a name used by The Sun to describe all those of the ilk of scientists and inventors- a deliberately light-hearted term the newspaper uses to take the sting out of sullying itself with stories of human excellence and achievement) don't have a partcularly impressive track record with health and safety when they're on the cusp of great discoveries. John Logie Baird, for example, managed during one of his early experiments in creating television to blow the entire power grid of Glasgow. In a similar vein a chap called Antonio Meucci- who the United States House of Representatives recently passed a motion honouring as the true inventor of the telephone- only came up with his idea after electrocuting his wife and hearing the sound travel down the wire. If this is what happened with two blokes who were only working on transmitting electronic signals across tiny distances, heaven only knows what'll transpire when those Swiss scientists attempt to recreate the birth of the Universe.
Which is why this is probably a good time to do everything (and, indeed, everyone) that you ever wanted to. Some scientists have postulated that if the hadron collider does create a little black hole of it's own it won't engulf the planet instantly, but rather take it's own sweet time going about it- which means that the whole of humanity will have a clock over it counting down unerringly towards annihilation.
Now if you're a fan of the movies, particularly the glut of disaster films from the late-90s that featured Earth teetering on the brink of destruction from aliens or an asteroid or something, then you'll know the drill. We all desperately try to flee the cities and get stuck in traffic or huddle up with our families by the TV and radio awaiting news of whether Will Smith or Bruce Willis has miraculously saved us all with seconds to spare. Then we all cheer, embrace tearfully and listen to a speech by President Morgan Freeman.
I've got a feeling that, in real life, this won't actually happen. Ask yourselves, is that really how you want to spend your final few hours and days on this planet, knowing that the end of everything is just around the corner? For a start off- and let's not be coy about this- who, knowing that impending armageddon will expunge all awkward consequences, wouldn't want to give mass, unadulterated fucking-on-the-streets a bash? Just imagine a great big, winner-takes-all, grab-the-nearest-stranger, thronging mass of limbs and fluids rolling merrily up the high street and into oblivion. Like Newcastle on a Friday night. That's a fitting way to give life a send-off.
Mind you, I did start this piece by stating that everyone should go out and find their special someone before time runs out, and it would take an extraordinary stroke of luck to dive head first (figuratively speaking) into a mass Book of Revelations orgy and happen to catch hold of your one true soulmate. But then again, a bookmaker once set the odds of Earth getting swallowed by a black hole in the next 50 years at 100 million-to-one. So things going horribly wrong in that reactor under the soil of Switzerland could turn out to be the luckiest thing that ever happened to us all and the chances of inadvertantly porking your spiritual muse seem tiny and easily surmountable by comparison. Or, alternatively, you could just play similar odds by buying a lottery ticket.
Either way you'd be getting screwed.
Think of that person. Now, tell them how you feel. Go on. Do it. Find the way to track them down and let them know, right now, that there's someone in the world for them and that someone is you. Tell them now, I'll wait here for you. And be quick about it.
Because you're about to die.
The harbinger of your impending doom, like so little else in human history, comes from Switzerland and goes by the rather bland name of 'The Large Hadron Collider'. Essentially, it's a 17 mile circular tunnel 100 metres below the Franco-Swiss border which is currently in the process of being cooled to -271.25 degrees centigrade. When this is done, the scientists who run it will then start firing beams of protons in opposite directions round the tunnel and make them crash into each other, thereby replicating conditions that prevailed within a few millionths-of-a-second of the Big Bang. And the reason they're doing all this is to test their current model of particle physics which, as they put it themselves, "is known to break down at a certain energy level".
Let's go through that again. A bunch of men in white coats realise that a very important theory of how absolutely everything fits together at the most minute level breaks in certain extreme conditions. 'Extreme conditions' being, in this case, an alternative way of saying 'The Big Bang'. They therefore have decided to recreate those exact same conditions or 'Big Bang' in a great big underground tunnel and just see what happens. Oh, and it'll all happen at light-speed.
Little wonder then that more than a few people are a tad worried that, since no-one knows what's going to actually take place, it's entirely possible that the experiment will do something like creating a black hole and swallow the Earth into itself.
The scientists at the colider themselves state that this is ludicrous as "there is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the Large Hadron Collider", which is frankly a bit rich from a bunch of chaps who are basically trying to demonstrate that one of their main theories doesn't work properly.
It's worth getting worried about what might happen when the collider goes online as boffins (a name used by The Sun to describe all those of the ilk of scientists and inventors- a deliberately light-hearted term the newspaper uses to take the sting out of sullying itself with stories of human excellence and achievement) don't have a partcularly impressive track record with health and safety when they're on the cusp of great discoveries. John Logie Baird, for example, managed during one of his early experiments in creating television to blow the entire power grid of Glasgow. In a similar vein a chap called Antonio Meucci- who the United States House of Representatives recently passed a motion honouring as the true inventor of the telephone- only came up with his idea after electrocuting his wife and hearing the sound travel down the wire. If this is what happened with two blokes who were only working on transmitting electronic signals across tiny distances, heaven only knows what'll transpire when those Swiss scientists attempt to recreate the birth of the Universe.
Which is why this is probably a good time to do everything (and, indeed, everyone) that you ever wanted to. Some scientists have postulated that if the hadron collider does create a little black hole of it's own it won't engulf the planet instantly, but rather take it's own sweet time going about it- which means that the whole of humanity will have a clock over it counting down unerringly towards annihilation.
Now if you're a fan of the movies, particularly the glut of disaster films from the late-90s that featured Earth teetering on the brink of destruction from aliens or an asteroid or something, then you'll know the drill. We all desperately try to flee the cities and get stuck in traffic or huddle up with our families by the TV and radio awaiting news of whether Will Smith or Bruce Willis has miraculously saved us all with seconds to spare. Then we all cheer, embrace tearfully and listen to a speech by President Morgan Freeman.
I've got a feeling that, in real life, this won't actually happen. Ask yourselves, is that really how you want to spend your final few hours and days on this planet, knowing that the end of everything is just around the corner? For a start off- and let's not be coy about this- who, knowing that impending armageddon will expunge all awkward consequences, wouldn't want to give mass, unadulterated fucking-on-the-streets a bash? Just imagine a great big, winner-takes-all, grab-the-nearest-stranger, thronging mass of limbs and fluids rolling merrily up the high street and into oblivion. Like Newcastle on a Friday night. That's a fitting way to give life a send-off.
Mind you, I did start this piece by stating that everyone should go out and find their special someone before time runs out, and it would take an extraordinary stroke of luck to dive head first (figuratively speaking) into a mass Book of Revelations orgy and happen to catch hold of your one true soulmate. But then again, a bookmaker once set the odds of Earth getting swallowed by a black hole in the next 50 years at 100 million-to-one. So things going horribly wrong in that reactor under the soil of Switzerland could turn out to be the luckiest thing that ever happened to us all and the chances of inadvertantly porking your spiritual muse seem tiny and easily surmountable by comparison. Or, alternatively, you could just play similar odds by buying a lottery ticket.
Either way you'd be getting screwed.