Possible Chain Reaction That Could Wipe Earth Out

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thing that would fall through the ground and into the core of the Earth, whereupon the natural rotation of the planet would have this very heavy whatchamacallit tearing apart the insides of our planet.
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Naw, wouldn't work.

When the molten "heavy stuff" got deep enough it would hit the water table. Said water table would quickly turn to steam, which would shoot the highly radioactive "heavy stuff" up into the atmosphere.

Just as bad though.

I read a few years back about scientists trying to create "stangelets" or "strange matter" in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York.

It struck me at the time that this was a particularly daft thing to do, and if you Wiki or Google Stranglets you'll see why.

Its also struck me on more than one occasion that whilst nuclear fusion might be the answer to all our energy needs, an uncontrolled reaction could prove to be just a wee bit nasty.

The cleverer we get, the more dangerous we get

Originally posted by hlesterjerome
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thing that would fall through the ground and into the core of the Earth, whereupon the natural rotation of the planet would have this very heavy whatchamacallit tearing apart the insides of our planet.
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Naw, wouldn't work.

When the molten "heavy stuff" got deep enough it would hit the water table. Said water table would quickly turn to steam, which would shoot the highly radioactive "heavy stuff" up into the atmosphere.

Just as bad though.

Reference the 1978 movie "The China Syndrome". It's about a nuclear power plant accident, starring Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda. The term "China Syndrome" refers to the possibility that the core would "melt down" and get hot enough to melt a hole deep into the Earth, and possibly to the water table (the term "China Syndrome is -- of course -- hyperbole, since theoretically if you dug a whole all the way through the Earth from the U.S., you would end up in China -- or so goes the myth).

In the film, they talk about the same possibility of a meltdown that reaches the water table and then explodes when the superheated material comes in contact with water (like the reaction you would get if you dropped a red-hot peice of steel into a bucket of water).

The weird thing about this film was that it was released the exact same time of the Three Mile Island Incident near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. At that time, I lived in Pennsylvania, about 150 miles (upwind) of Harrisburg. My brother and I went to see "The China Syndrome" at the same moment hell was breaking loose at Three Mile Island. I remember an eerily prophetic line in the film when some engineer or scientist is describing what a meltdown could do if it hit the water table. He said "it would contaminate an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania"! I remember everyone in the theater took a collective gasp. Luckily for Pennsylvania, the core remained contained.


[edit on 7-6-2007 by Soylent Green Is People]

Originally posted by neformore
I read a few years back about scientists trying to create "stangelets" or "strange matter" in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York.

It struck me at the time that this was a particularly daft thing to do, and if you Wiki or Google Stranglets you'll see why.

Its also struck me on more than one occasion that whilst nuclear fusion might be the answer to all our energy needs, an uncontrolled reaction could prove to be just a wee bit nasty.

The cleverer we get, the more dangerous we get

Very Nice! This was the response I was looking for. I assume when you say a few years back you mean the past 5-10. I personally agree with your statement the more clever we get, the more dangerous we become. With this realization we must ask ourselfs when are we going to create a mistake. I know next to nothing about Cold Fussion, H-Bombs and Strange Matter but are we not steping into dangerous almost unnecessary dagerous part of life?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (opening next year) is looking to create Black Holes and Strangelets. There are some people who think this could be dangerous.

Link:
www.risk-evaluation-forum.org...

I read another article about the LHC and some scientist there said "The black hole we create hopefully will only last a few millionths of a second before it evaporates". The part of that quote that shook me was the use of the word "Hopefully".

I'm not a physicist, so I don't know what the probabilities are of global destruction, but there are at least some "smart people" who think the probabilty is not "zero"

EDIT -- UPDATE:
I've done a little more reading, and it seems that all this discussion about the Probality of black hole evaporation (known as "Hawking Evaporation") does not mean that an extremely high percentage (near 100) of all mini black holes will evaporate, but instead what they are saying is that there is a possibilty the theory of Hawking evaporation could be all wrong, and that no black holes will evaporate. So the probablity of the black hole consumes the whole Earth is either 100% or 0% -- with nothing in between. It seems to me they're putting a lot of faith into a relatively new theory that has yet to be adequately proven.

[edit on 7-6-2007 by Soylent Green Is People]

[edit on 7-6-2007 by Soylent Green Is People]

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (opening next year) is looking to create Black Holes and Strangelets. There are some people who think this could be dangerous.

Link:
www.risk-evaluation-forum.org...

I read an article about the LHC and some scientist there said "The black hole we create hopefully will only last a few millionths of a second before it evaporates". The part of that quote that shook me was the use of the word "Hopefully".

I'm not a physicist, so I don't know what the probabilities are of global destruction, but there are at least some "smart people" who think the probabilty is not "zero"

[edit on 7-6-2007 by Soylent Green Is People]

Ha ha yeah that part was funny!! But I went over the rest of it and im pretty sure thats not in English....jk jk.....On a serious note though I would not experiment with something that will "hopefully" not cause the destruction of the planet. I guess the possible conclusion to this question I originally had is that us humans have invented a lot of things that could of potentially had asuicidal outcome but this formula of playing with the unknown + hope can = a positive outcome or a deadly outcome is formula that can only go the way we want it to for so long...

Does anyone smell a petition?



[edit on 7-6-2007 by Soul_Contagious]

I don't think you need to worry about strangelets, the chances of a stable one forming are about 0.

Here's a nice top 10 list, including information about likelyhood of it happening and how the earth's final resting place woul look after each one

LiveScience: Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth

David 2012 --

You got me thinking...How far from the Earth can a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) be and still incinerate every living thing on the planet? 100 lightyears? 500? 1000? maybe 5000? Does anybody know the answer?

Can a GRB can be relatively far from us, even on a galactic scale, and still kill us all? Are there any astro-physicists out there?

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
David 2012 --

You got me thinking...How far from the Earth can a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) be and still incinerate every living thing on the planet? 100 lightyears? 500? 1000? maybe 5000? Does anybody know the answer?

Can a GRB can be relatively far from us, even on a galactic scale, and still kill us all? Are there any astro-physicists out there?

GRB's have been thought to have caused mass extinctions in the past.

As the earth moves into and out of the arms of the galaxy, it is exposed to increasing/decreasing amounts of cosmic radiation. Also, the solar systems orbit around the centre of the Galaxy oscillates up and down as well. As we align to the galactic plane, we are also exposed to increasing amounts of radiation.

I beleive that a suitably large GRB could affect us from thousands of light years away. It depends on the size.

I forgot the "grey goo" theory of Nanobots

Take one batch of Nanobots. Program them to take the raw materials around them, deconstruct the objects and then reproduce. Accidentally forget to code the bit that tells them what to make with the bits and let them go.

Eventually everything (and everyone) gets broken down into nanobots that are looking for things to break down.

Nasty way to go.

It is now believed that many galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers, and that whether such galaxies are active galaxies is a question of whether mass is being fed into these black holes. The simplest ideas for the origin of such supermassive black holes are that they are conglomerations of many star-size black holes that were formed during the history of a galaxy, or perhaps that galaxies formed around large black holes that then grew by accreting matter.

from:csep10.phys.utk.edu...

My question is: if one of these super-massive black holes lies at the centre of the milky way, and it is emitting a very focused, very strong radio jet that we haven't seen yet, AND we aligned with this jet when we align with the galactic centre... what could the outcome possibly be?

Oh, and here's a great site giving a real-time skymap of GRB's
grb.sonoma.edu...

Total annihilation of the Earth and everything we know is certainly one possibility.

Originally posted by KarillaMy question is: if one of these super-massive black holes lies at the centre of the milky way, and it is emitting a very focused, very strong radio jet that we haven't seen yet, AND we aligned with this jet when we align with the galactic centre... what could the outcome possibly be?

Not much. We've been "aligned with the galactic center" for quite some time.

It's not a tiny spot in the sky. It's a huge section of the Milky Way (about 1/12th of it. Go outside and look at the stars and you'll see we're aligned with our galaxy already.

Actually there is a theory out there as to why no advanced civilization could be visiting Earth that goes very well along these lines. (I don't remember the theories name offhand though.)

It postulates that all advanced species eventually discovers the one thing that destroys them.

It may be the lone researcher in a lab that creates a superbug, it may be the government agency that creates the ultimate bomb, it may be anything between the two.

It's a serious bummer as theories go, but it's still a valid theory.

^
^^mrwupy --

In the famous Drake Equation for estimating the number of intelligent civilizations (N) with the ability to communicate with us across space:

N = R x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L

Dr. Frank Drake used 10,000 years for the value of "L", which is the estimated lifespan of a civilization. I believe that takes into account the possibility that a civilization "kills itself" before they ever have the chance to contact us. Of course Drake's values for his variables could be wrong, but there was some thought put into them.

Modern humans (Homo sapiens have been around for about 130,000 to 200,000 years, but we have only had a "civilization" for about 12,000 years -- when we stopped being nomadic hunter-gatherers and settled in one place to be farmers. So according to Drake's equation, we're due to blow ourselves up about right now.

Here's a link to the Drake Equation wikipedia article:
en.wikipedia.org...

Also see "The Fermi Paradox":
en.wikipedia.org...

[edit on 10-6-2007 by Soylent Green Is People]

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
David 2012 --

You got me thinking...How far from the Earth can a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) be and still incinerate every[...]

I have to confess I don't have much knowledge about GRB's apart from what i've seen in documentaries and read in articles.

I know we've observed GRB's in other galaxies that seemed to effect over 25% of the galaxy.

If the Milky Way is roughly between 80.000 and 100.000 ly across then lemme think.
Anywhere from 4000ly to 100.000ly away can affect us?
If it's a really large burst like some, it doesn't matter, if it's in this galaxy it's close enough. The articles I've seen had statements like potentially sterilizing a complete galaxy.

[edit on 10/6/2007 by David2012]

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
^
^^mrwupy --

In the famous Drake Equation for estimating the number of intelligent civilizations (N) with the ability to communicate with us across space:
[...]

I did some work with the Drake equation and came to 366 civilization's in this galaxy at this moment that have interstellar communication technology.

I can post it if wanted, I have it saved somewhere.

reply to post by Brother Stormhammer


"moot" point ... not "mute" point