Ron Jeremy, Peter North in... The Large Hardon Collider

I'm sure you've all heard about the Large Hadron Collider aka blackhole creating end-of-the-world machine that came online last week. A few nutjobs were claiming that it was going to destroy the planet, while most of the world's press were hailing it as being able to fill in the last word of the quantum physics crossword. It will do none of those of course, but it's still pretty awesome.

The best part of it is that it is an example of humans getting together, across borders and scientific divides, to solve a problem. Of course there are many specific problems that the various scientists are hoping to solve but the one they will most assuredly solve is what happens when you collide protons together at 99.999999% the speed of light. What this will give us I'm not sure, but it's bound to be awesome.

The wiki article I just read says that some have criticised the LHC for not focusing all this money and effort into something more important, like climate change or world hunger. Nuts to that I say. You've got to start somewhere, and I think just getting all this money and all these people together is a bloody great start.

This thing is expected to cost between 6 and 11 Billion dollars. Shitloads really. Which makes it all that more awesome. It's $6 billion spent on something that is not really expected to give any return except for, and here is the point, the benefit to mankind's knowledge of the universe. This is the kind of stuff that should be going on all the time. Pure research for research's sake.

As everyone knows, we have fucked this world up royally. Business is not going to get us out of it while there is still a profit to be made maintaining the status quo. I am a fan of market economics usually but only when they are steered/forced in the right direction by government. It just doesn't seem like it's happening with this whole global warming-global pollution thing so I fear that by the time business switch over properly it will be too late. Basically what I'm saying is we need a miracle. And where do you get miracles? Billion dollar pure-research facilities, that's where.

The other promising thing is how much the media and populations in general have gotten behind the LHC. Everyday people in the street are talking about the Higgs Boson for fuck's sake, it's bloody amazing. Short-lived I'm sure, but I can guarantee there were thousands of scientists around the world watching that and thinking "Holy shit, if we could get a fraction of that support behind our [turtle migration/algae blooming/oxide depositing/cold fusioning] research we'd be able to fund ourselves until our grandkids had PhDs!"

So that's my point. Science got us into this earthly mess we are in and, by Newton, science can get us out of it. We just need to fund it, and the LHC is a shining example of just that.

Two more LHC facts before I go:

1) All they did the other day is run some particles around the thing. They didn't actually collide any. That's not for a few more weeks. So the end of the world is still nigh.

2) Some girl in India apparently committed suicide just as the LHC was starting its test run. Premature maybe, or maybe she was just securing a good spot in heaven. Imagine the line up at the pearly gates when this thing goes live in a few weeks time.