With great power comes great responsibility. As our grip on Earth grows ever tighter, so does the possibility that we could destroy it, or at least ourselves. But the prospect pales into insignificance when you consider that we may have the power to do something even worse.
We could destroy the universe.
Remember the outcry when CERN was getting ready to start smashing particles together in its Large Hadron Collider? A few doomsayers warned that it might be opening the door to the apocalypse.
This existential angst was triggered by the prospect of protons colliding at extremely high energies. Einstein's general theory of relativity suggests that concentrating this kind of energy in a volume smaller than an atom might distort space and time enough to tear a hole in the fabric of the universe. This "mini black hole" could rapidly expand ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.
No comments:
Post a Comment