The strange way Earth dies

There has been a lot of talk about how the operation of the new generation
of atom smashers may be able to make a kind of mater dubbed 'strange'
matter, and how this strange matter may in fact destroy the Earth. Looking
into the whole business, I was surprised to learn that this disaster
scenario is in fact something that should be and has been taken seriously by
many responsible scientists and concerned persons. First the scenario for
disaster:

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) have started to operate
the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) which smashes gold atoms into
each other with such speeds that the energy released far surpasses any
nuclear reaction, and has not been seen since the first few billionths of a
second after the Big Bang. According to Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), this
energy level should produce a quark-gluon plasma. When the plasma cools down
and begins to recondense into matter, some unstable superheavy forms of
matter with an excess of strange quarks ought to be produced - this is
dubbed a strangelet. If the strangelet is positively charged, the nucleons
of normal matter will be repelled by it and any strangelet lasting less then
a nanosecond will decay into normal hadronic matter, thus offering no
danger. A negatively charged strangelet is a different beast. The strangelet
is so massive that it 'sparks' the vacuum surrounding it, producing
electrons and positrons. The positrons will combine with the electrons of an
ordinary atom, exposing the positively charged nucleus which then will be
attracted to the strangelets negative charge and be absorbed by it, feeding
the strangelet and making it more stable and able to absorb more atoms.

Once this process starts, there is no way to stop it. If the unstable
strangelet that is produced in the collider experiment lasts long enough to
hit the containment wall of the reaction chamber (where its food is), it
will become stable and permanent after absorbing as few as a hundred
protons. After mingling, and feeding within the containment vessel and the
superconducting magnets, it will begin a trip down towards the center of the
earth, eating atoms and getting larger all the way down. The strangelet will
release a lot of radiation as it gobbles up matter and grows. Eventually,
there will be the equivalent of a star -a strange star- at the earth's
center releasing horrendous quantities of energy as the earth begins to
infall in bigger and bigger chunks.

How long it will take for the entire earth to be absorbed and converted into
a lump of strange matter about the size of a 2 story house? NO one really
knows. It could take days, or months. No one thinks it could take years, or
be within mere hours- so we will have plenty of time to comprehend what is
going to kill us, and the nightmarish manner of our eventual individual
deaths. We would feel the effects well before we die in the strangelet.
There would be earthquakes, mild at first, but getting stronger as time
passes. They would occur regularly and eventually continuously. There would
be Tsunamis which would drown the populations near the shores of the earth's
oceans. Weather would be affected as well. The massive heating of the
planet's crust would permanently alter the ocean's currents and cause
violent storms unlike anything we can imagine today - and that would only be
the beginning. Changes to the planet would be terminal. Eventually the
energy released by infalling matter would cause the earth's core to expand
which would rupture the crust and release toxic gasses, and bubble magma
onto the continental plates, which would eventually sink into the ocean of
molten rock and killing most of the life on our planet. Eventually, as the
core gets absorbed, it will collapse back onto the strangelet and 'drain'
into it. Without anything to support it, what is left of the Earths' crust
collapses and is pulverized then liquefied and sucked into the strangelet.

If you were on the moon watching this, eventually, you would be standing on
a lone planetary body orbiting a lump of strange matter with the earth's
mass and having the size of a typical 2 story house. It would be glowing
white hot, but would begin to cool down, turning into a lifeless strange
planet in a few hundred million years.

The scary part of the story is that particle scientists say it is not
fiction - that every time they run a particle experiment using the new
generation of relativistic colliders, we run the small risk of having
exactly this happen. There have been several lawsuits in the USA seeking to
stop the indicated experiments until the analysis and risk effects have been
fully understood, but they have been dismissed in court. Scientists have
been saying the risk is 'very low' that this will happen. But, how low does
it have to be when you are talking about the complete and total destruction
of the earth and everything on it?

You decide how much your life and the lives of your children are worth. What
is your future worth?

Greysky

www.allocations.cc
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