From MSNBC:
Former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner has been raising such questions for years - first about an earlier-generation "big bang machine" known as the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, and more recently about the LHC.
Last Friday, Wagner and another critic of the LHC's safety measures, Luis Sancho, filed a lawsuit in Hawaii's U.S. District Court. The suit calls on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to ease up on their LHC preparations for several months while the collider's safety was reassessed.
Is the LHC dangerous? Maybe so - it just sort of looks evil, doesn't it? Obviously designed by the DHARMA Initiative.
In all seriousness, I've written about the risks of the LHC before, and I think this lawsuit has merit. In essence, my arguement is this: Since it's creators admit LHC will "go into an area that we really don't understand", how could they accurately assess the risk? And if the consequence of being wrong is utter annihilation, should we be doing this? I believe the answer is no - at least not on Earth. The probability of disaster is low, but not zero.
I've posted many times about Existential Risks , which are risks to the very existence of humanity. Since humanity has never dealt with an existential risk (we wouldn't be here if we had) none of our institutions - such as the federal court system - are equipped to handle them. We usually learn from experience - good old trial-and-error. That doesn't work with existential risks. We only get one chance, and if we're wrong we won't be here to try again.
Imagine a man picking up a gun without knowing how many bullets (if any) are in the cylinder. He pulls the trigger five times, and nothing happens. He thinks OK, I've pulled the trigger of this revolver five times and it didn't fire. I bet this gun is empty!" He puts the gun to his head and confidently pulls the trigger.
We're about to pull the trigger on the LHC. Is the chamber empty?
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