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Science could end us all

Lark

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I was watching a TV show about alternative energy sources which was surveying nuclear power and all the various disasters, now, I dont want to discuss those specifically but I was thinking about the harmful consequences of science driven projects per se in comparison with those of religion.

There's been wars associated with scientific ideologies and religion and the jury, at least here, is out on that one but when religion has driven a project you get pilgrimages, possibly mass neurosis or something like that, not meltdowns which irradiate everyone "believers" and "non-believers" alike.

I tend to think that the old fashioned public skepticism embodied in the characture of "mad science" makes sense, this polar world of religion vs. science sort of ignores the capacity with which both are great at ignoring common decency and sometimes common sense.
 

nozflubber

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Dude, I'm still worried about them making a stable black hole at the Hadron collider. it's not popular to admit it but I do - what if the QM models/projections are wrong? Many of the safety calculations are based upon theoretical physics and not empirical observations - so what if Theory is wrong/incomplete as it often is? How would we prevent a singularity from sucking up the entire Earth? What if all the black holes currently in existence in our universe were actually created by the earliest civilizations of lifeforms that have advanced to the point of tinkering with subatomic particles?

I was reading some article saying that the probably of spawning a black hole with sufficient energy to sustain itself is about one in 10,000,000, so we shouldn't worry about it!! I was like uhhhhh...... maybe we not ought to be doing that, because that's not exactly "impossible". A nuclear meltdown is one pesky thing, but a singularity on our surface will end everything FOREVER.
 

Lark

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Yeah, I was thinking about that shit too to be honest, although what if they open some portal to hell like Doom?

It'd be the most ironic collision of science and religion ever!
 

nozflubber

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That or like, an entire horde of vicious TROGDORS steps through, and lays waste to the countryside!

trogdor.png


oh the humanity!
 

Katsuni

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If yeu look at the actual information on stuff like 3 mile island and chernobyl though, these 'accidents' weren't really all that accidental, and took alot of effort to force them to occur, and/or were using very old crappy designs.

The current models are designed in such a way that it's not physically possible for them to "melt down"; the only real risk is honestly someone getting ahold of used control rods, which's more a terrorist situation than anything else, and wouldn't be dangerous in a large scale, due to the nature of that material.

Nuclear reactors are currently some of the cleanest, and safest of methods of creating electricity at the moment.

Religion, however, has actually killed more people in total, and tends to account for full blown active attempts to cause a genocide. Technology may provide tools to do so, but if we just had rocks and the name of god, that's all we'd need to try to do it anyway. The tools just make it easier is all.



As for Noz, keep in mind that a singularity with the power to sustain itself does not mean it's powerful enough to actually 'do' anything of value.

The definition of a black hole is just one at which the density is higher than a specific value relative to its' volume.

I'll just steal a quote from wikipedia because they say it fairly clearly:

The Schwarzschild radius (sometimes historically referred to as the gravitational radius) is a characteristic radius associated with every quantity of mass. It is the radius of a sphere in space, that if containing a correspondingly sufficient amount of mass (and therefore, reaches a certain density), the force of gravity from the contained mass would be so great that no known force or degeneracy pressure could stop the mass from continuing to collapse in volume into a point of infinite density: a gravitational singularity (colloquially referred to as a black hole).

The Schwarzschild radius of an object is proportional to the mass. Accordingly, the Sun has a Schwarzschild radius of approximately 3 km,[3] while the Earth's is only about 9 mm, the size of a peanut.

Meaning that if yeu had something as massive as the entirety of the entire planet earth... compressed small enough to be considered a black hole... it would have a radius of 9 mm.

Even *IF* they somehow managed to make a sustained black hole, it wouldn't have enough mass to actually draw in anything more than a few nanometers away, and that additional mass wouldn't increase its' gravitational force enough to pull in anything farther away than it already had.

In short, yes, they could make a black hole, it's highly unlikely, but they could. If they did, it wouldn't really matter though because it wouldn't be the 'infinite gravitational anomaly' we've come to associate the term with... it just literally wouldn't have enough mass to even move an atom via gravity alone, in comparison to the neccesary amount required to overpower the gravity of the rest of the earth.

Seriously, let's take a baseball for an example. Are yeu worried about a baseball's gravity being strong enough to move even a pebble from the ground next to it? No, because the friction is way stronger than the gravity output of the baseball. If yeu make the baseball smaller, but leave the mass the same, it still has the same identical force of gravity... the only difference being that *IF* something happens to touch it, it'll stick. Considering how ridiculously tiny the event horizon of a sub-atomic sized black hole would be... (smaller than the radius of an atom...), it would be pretty difficult to even have anything actually fall within that radius in the first place, and even if something did, it wouldn't increase the mass enough to increase the event horizon far enough for it to pick up anything else.

So anyways, if they made a black hole, it wouldn't suck the entire planet into it by any stretch of the imagination; best it would do is maybe manage to suck in a few dozen atoms, and then it wouldn't have the strength to move anything else, and would just sit there. Maybe the rare neutrino would bump into it and over millions of years it would grow large enough to have a miniscule effect on its' surroundings. The sun would burn out long before it ever had the time to grow to any size of worry.

In short, I'd be more concerned about the sun dying in a few billion years, because even if a black hole is made from the LHC, it'll take longer than that to even be noticeable.
 

EcK

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And appart from stating the obvious ?
 

JocktheMotie

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As long as our science doesn't outpace our culture we should be fine. The real worry is if we find technology. Like a kid finding a gun.
 

freedom geek

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I find that the prospects of science destroying the world are vastly overstated in most cases. For instance even if a black hole were created by the LHC and it did not evaporate it would be smaller than a proton and would take longer than the remaining time of the earth to grow enough to become a threat. Anyway if the world had to end; I'd like it to end with science.
 

BlueGray

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Dude, I'm still worried about them making a stable black hole at the Hadron collider. it's not popular to admit it but I do - what if the QM models/projections are wrong? Many of the safety calculations are based upon theoretical physics and not empirical observations - so what if Theory is wrong/incomplete as it often is? How would we prevent a singularity from sucking up the entire Earth? What if all the black holes currently in existence in our universe were actually created by the earliest civilizations of lifeforms that have advanced to the point of tinkering with subatomic particles?

I was reading some article saying that the probably of spawning a black hole with sufficient energy to sustain itself is about one in 10,000,000, so we shouldn't worry about it!! I was like uhhhhh...... maybe we not ought to be doing that, because that's not exactly "impossible". A nuclear meltdown is one pesky thing, but a singularity on our surface will end everything FOREVER.

A black hole with sufficient energy to sustain itself would be roughly the mass of the earth. So to create a dangerous black hole we would either need to destroy earth first or find the mass from somewhere else. This is why they aren't all that worried.

My Astronomy final from last year has proved useful :).
 

teslashock

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Listen, science is the king of the Earth as we know it. If it weren't for science, then we wouldn't be spending countless hours on this forum arguing about ridiculous nonsense, as there'd be no fiber optics, and we'd all be dead of smallpox or some equivalently dreadful disease.

Science gave us medicine, yummy food, video games (tehe, Zelda), and better yet, the ability to screw without popping out a kid every year. So if science wants to hold a magnifying glass above our heads and shoot sunbeams, then so be it. At this point, the least we can do for science is humbly grant it the power to do whatever the fuck it desires, even if its wants are sensationally apocalyptic.
 

ajblaise

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Listen, science is the king of the Earth as we know it. If it weren't for science, then we wouldn't be spending countless hours on this forum arguing about ridiculous nonsense, as there'd be no fiber optics, and we'd all be dead of smallpox or some equivalently dreadful disease.

Science gave us medicine, yummy food, video games (tehe, Zelda), and better yet, the ability to screw without popping out a kid every year. So if science wants to hold a magnifying glass above our heads and shoot sunbeams, then so be it. At this point, the least we can do for science is humbly grant it the power to do whatever the fuck it desires, even if its wants are sensationally apocalyptic.

+1

Science FTW. Really, sometimes, it doesn't get enough credit.

It could potentially be used to destroy us, but more than likely, it will be what saves us, time and time again.
 

Timeless

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Science in itself can't do anything, it's the scientist and person behind it that can do good or harm. Obviously a mad scientist can end us all just as much as a mad theologian, but a book on chemistry doesn't explode by itself the same way a book on religion doesn't squirt holy water on you! :laugh:
 

Feops

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"Science" is not some sort of force that opposes religion.
 

Totenkindly

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"Science" is not some sort of force that opposes religion.

No, that would be Satan, wielding Evolution in one hand and Materialism in the other.

I tend to be more scared of religion, actually, because it is SO resistant to modification. People can just do and say and believe crazy-ass things that end up hurting a lot of people and foster attitudes that are relationally destructive... and it's hard to get your hands on it and nearly impossible to have someone reevaluate.

Meanwhile, science actually has self-correcting mechanisms built into it just by definition. Look at any discipline and you'll actually see large flips that have occurred within them over the space of only a few decades. So as far as scientific ideology/frameworks go, they DO change if challenged sufficiently.

The main fear with science seems to be tinkering with things without really understanding the long-term implications, whether it's letting plastics/chemicals slowly seep into the food chain or a drug meant for a good purpose might cause unexpected long-term harm, or... well, just the typical "big bang boom bomb" scenario.
 

Kra

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The LHC conversations always remind me of this.
633591425533104931-divisionbyzero.jpg


Excellent post Katsuni btw. :yes:


Ultimately, people like to blow the dangers of science out of proportion. In the words of Wilco, "Every generation thinks it's the last, thinks it's the end of the world."
 

Lark

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I dont think anyone is blowing the dangers of science out of proportion, if anything I think the opposite happens and religion, unless its some sort of new age spiritualism, has its negative or harmful traits exaggerated.

If you consider the popular and literary attitudes towards science years ago, for instance Jekyl and Hyde, Frankenstein, Burke and Hare, literary as well as in fact, or more recently Mengele's experimentation on people and BF Skinner's Behaviourism, mainly in fact, there was a more balance perspective. People were able to see and know "mad science" and there was nothing like the consequences then that there are now, the impacts both humanitarian and ecological of Cernobyl (spelling), mile island etc. out way anything that miracle sites or pilgrimages could have wrought (crusades and inquisitions are a different matter and reflecting a human/temporal need rather than divine grace or true revelation they do have their "rational" or secular equivalents).
 
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