Wonder and whimsy on the Web

Bilal , Chicago, IL — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:25:04 GMT

hi Alan, your Cracked.com link points to the wrong place.

Second, the title is wrong "The 5 experiments most likely to end the world"

the likelyhood of LHC doing anything damaging, let alone ending the world is nill. You are more likely to destroy planet earth by experimenting with nuclear fusion (in either case it is highly unlikely).

This article from NYT's Gail Collins puts it in perspective:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/opinion/23collins.html

money quote:
So I called Landsberg, who explained that in physics, there is no such thing as zero chance. “For instance, if all the molecules of air in the room where you’re sitting would suddenly cross to one side, you would not have any air to breathe. This probability is not zero. It is in the 10 to the minus-25 range.”

[ALAN ADDS: Ugh, I'm having a problem with the browser (and the brain) not moving as fast as my fingers lately ... Thanks so much to you (and others) for the fix. And I realize there's more than a little hyperbole to some of these offerings, that's why I try to signal that with the "whimsy" label. I also appreciate the link to Gail Collins' column, the figures I've been seeing lately are in that 10^-25 to 10^-31 range. I think someone needs to calculate the "background risk" of cosmic catastrophe, just as the experts in asteroid tracking calculate the background risk for a 1-km-wide rock hitting Earth out of the blue.

[The figures I've seen for the background risk of that kind of impact is 1-in-500,000 for a given year. Based on those calculations, the risk of a catastrophic space impact is somewhere around a septillion times higher than the risk of a catastrophic LHC event. The way I figure it, if you were to drive to the edge of the observable universe and back about five times, your car's odometer would hit something on the order of 1 septillion miles. But of course, my figures could be off. After all, I had a gosh-darn Web link wrong. ;-)]