The 5 Scientific Experiments Most Likely to End the World
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#2.
Time Travel
Hundreds of stories have been written on the subject of time travel, and just about every one of those stories involves some kind of catastrophic disaster, or at the very least, an unhappy ending. Of course, a lot of physicists think that it's not possible at all, and that the very existence of the universe proves it. Also, if they invent time travel in the future, where are the time travelers? But there's one lingering theory about the possibility of time travel that kind of makes a lot of sense, and that's that it's not possible until we actually build a working time machine. Maybe you can only travel back as far as the technology actually exists, and after that it's all hovering skateboards and flying steam trains.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Of course, there are plenty of ways in which the universe can fuck us for daring to violate that most fundamental of laws, cause and effect. We can't even imagine them until we know the first thing about time travel, which we don't. But some speculate that the very attempt to travel back in time could result in the world exploding, imploding, collapsing, shrinking into a singularity, or simply disappearing.
But because we strive to bring you only the weirdest of possibilities, so consider the chronological collapse scenario. In the distant future, when the stars have burned out and the planets have wobbled out of their celestial orbits, the descendents of humanity will be staring extinction in the face, and if they have access to a goddamn time machine then it's likely they're going to say "fuck this shit" and just return to a more comfortable point in history. A flood of refugees from the future might set up home in the present and flourish, until the world ends again and they decide to do what worked last time. And again. And again. Effectively, the moment we switch on our very first time machine, our universe is going to be home to approximately infinity refugees from the future. You do the math. So, Basically It's Like... This: How Long Have We Got? Meet the Large Goddamn Hadron Fucking Collider.
Again? What the fuck? Are they doing this on purpose? OK, so there may be like a dozen ways the LHC can destroy the universe, but seriously, time travel? Well, yes, according to some Russian scientists. Sure, there are no serious plans in motion to research into building time machines, but who says it has to be deliberate? The discovery of penicillin was a complete accident.
The theory is that the LHC might open wormholes with its high-energy collisions that future generations can manipulate for time travelling purposes. Apparently it's possible that those Swiss eggheads will switch on the machine only to find a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger asking for their clothes. Risk Level: 7 You may be thinking, "If we get a time machine, and realize it will destroy the universe, then all we'd have to do is travel back in time and destroy the time machine! Easy!" But then... if we destroyed the time machine, then we wouldn't be able to go back in time... so the machine would remain intact, in which case we could use it to go back and... Look, we don't know. Fuck science. #1.
Nanotechnology
Technology is all about making things smaller, and to that end, right now they're working on making the smallest things possible. Nanotechnology is the science of making robots that aren't much bigger than a molecule, and there are lots of reasons for doing it, the biggest being because we fucking can. Imagine sending a million microscopic machines into a person's bloodstream programmed to attack a tumor, or shoot the AIDS virus with tiny little phasers. Imagine swarms of little cleaning droids mopping up the pollution in our rivers, or tiny manufacturing droids that can build anything we want, in seconds, molecule-by-molecule. The big problem is, of course, how you actually build trillions of these little bastards. Simple: you teach them to replicate like cells, using materials from the environment.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong? K. Eric Drexler, one of the founding fathers of the whole nanotechnology concept, came up with a number of spine-chillingly plausible doomsday scenarios. The problem is our nanobots would be like cellular terminators, much more advanced than any of the pansy-ass creations nature invented. They could out-compete organic life overnight, obliterating it in a frenzy of Darwinism.
Taken to its extreme, we have the scenario affectionately known as the gray goo problem, which speculates the machines would simply start replicating out of control until everything in existence is just a mass of tiny, scuttling robots, which scientists imagine would look like a pile of gray slop floating through the void. So, Basically It's Like... Imagine you meet a magical leprechaun. For a bargain price, he offers to fix up the your house and add an extra room. So you take him home, and he proceeds to eat your house and shit out a hundred and forty more leprechans, which promptly murder you.
How Long Have We Got? Scientists excitedly assure us that we will have a fully operational murderous death-swarm within twenty years, maybe even as soon as 2010. Right now they're trying to build something called a fabricator, which from our reading is some kind of indestructible robot swarm-queen built out of diamond, who will give birth to trillions of nanomachines and command them to consume all in their path. Risk Level: 10 Basically the only thing that will save us from getting transformed into globulets of grey goo in a few years will be if the Large Hadron Collider kills us first. For more evidence that science is pure evil check out The 5 Current Genetic Experiments Most Likely to Destroy Humanity. Or if you're tired of hating science, check out 5 Mental Disorders That Can Totally Get You Laid. |
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Oh brother. Normally I find a lot of Cracked stuff funny, but the sheer paranoia of this one actually drove me to make an account just to comment on this:
1. The Big Bang was not so much the creation of matter as the release of matter. The state of the universe at the Big Bang, according to General Relativity, was infinitely small, infinitely dense, and infinitely hot. At the Big Bang, Everything moved away from each other, making the universe larger, less dense, and colder. No new material being formed. In other words, the most we'd get out of this is a miniature universe of a whopping two particles. More appear everywhere instantly in Quantum mechanics. Speaking of which...
2. I'm no expert in quantum mechanics, but t my knowledge, it's not observing the universe itself but interacting with it. For instance, shining EMR on a particle to "see" it changes it's rate of movement. However, detecting a Supernova doesn't work like that. We do not shine light onto them; the light from a supernova reaches us. Indeed, we have no impact on it what so ever... at least not for however many light years away it was, assuming it's still there in a completely non-changing state. (Hah, yeah right. Nothing stays the same in QM)
3. Again, this is happening all the time. Although Command and Conquer had fun with this concept, there doesn't seem to be much of a threat. Also, enough with the LHC already.
4. Oh brother. You don't seem to even have a solid basis for this one, beyond "Oh, no one knows what will happen." Furthermore, Quantum mechanics already shows that Time Travel is possible on a quantum level, both forwards and backwards. Also, a sudden influx of Colonists from the end of the world would presumably have the knowledge to, rather than go back in time to a vastly more primitive era on earth, oh, GO SOMEWHERE ELSE. Fun Fact: The Wormholes mentioned for time travel can remain in the same time-dimension, but transfer to a different space.
5. So the apocalypse is based on the cration of a mechanical supervirus consuming everything? For starters, since when have computers ever worked perfectly? Second, I don't know where you figure that the order to "consume all in their path" comes from. Finally, EMF really does a number on computers, last I checked. Or do your credit cards work after being swiped by a magnet?
Quite frankly, I'm amazed Nukes aren't on this list. They actually might do it.
I've pictured one of the possible scenarios at http://nrai.deviantart.com/art/About-the-LHC-85783833
Based on actual scientific speculations[citation needed]
nanobots will kill us! they have to stop researching them it's obvious some douche is gonna mess up (actually all it takes it's one cancerous bot even a slight radiation could do it is it works does with human cells) and we'll all end up being consumed from the inside by millions of those fuckers. I'd so much rather LHC would kill us first (after letting us take a peek of the beginning of the universe of course, or at least a couple of other dimensions, before we crush into a singularity).
As was already stated in the article, the collisions that will occur in the LHC occur ALL THE f*****g TIME in the atmosphere. Like, by the time you finish reading the article, trillions of collisions will have occurred. The LHC simply allows us to observe these collisions.
That large hadron collider is going to kill us all.
I think these scientists need to stop with their "destroy humanity because I'm bored as hell" and (re)start with the "Lets find a cure for s**t that we can't find a cure for"
Oh s**t... In a year or twenty, the whole world is going to be just like one of those Terminator Movies, execept we have no f*****g chance, and there's no one to help us. That'd take about ten seconds for us all to f*****g die, and there would be no one left to sue the a*****e scientists, or chop off their dicks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWmJfX2AI2Q -an accurate depiction of #3/a TANGStrange Matter Apocalypse.
It was only a matter of time before someone linked to End of Evangelion...
"Look at that particle. What an a*****e."
I nearly died laughing.
yeah i think nano tech is gonna kill us so think of it were going to have those thing in our heart our most inportd thing(other than skin and brin)what is one took contoll and starte zappin stuff and probly end your life god dang since!
gee S3 the LHC hasn't destroyed us yet because the f****r broke down immediately after they fired it up. (not saying that it will destroy us)
Has no one watched Stargate? They had evil nanobots. They were called Replicators. They're pretty much invincible. So why build s**t that'll kill us? Goddamn.
Please, writer of this article, can you stop using God's name in vain in your article and stop swearing please!!! That really could end the world!
Let me show you a graph I made:
Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed us yet? --------------> NO!
It's only human nature to be scared by stuff you don't fully understand.
With that said, this article should SO be mentioned on Wikipedia. Preferably on its article about the Large Hadron Collider.
MOAK.....
No guarantee that you are reading this today because it seems like it has been a couple months for you, but...just out of curiosity-have you crunched the numbers to know that all is going to be well? And, since you have that guesstimate, you should post them so that people actually believe you know what the hell you're talking about rather than making a statement you do not have the means to prove, nor are you some man high up on the food chain that demands respect from any other reader on why we should give a s**t on what it is that you claim without presenting the facts yourself!
has anyone seen the knowing?
what if that happens???
It was this article that first turned me on to cracked and made me want to contribute. Funniest thing I ever read, not shitting you.
Funny website: http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
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@ The MadCommentor, oh brother, normally I find comments on Cracked funny, but the sheer amount of boring that is your comment has actually driven me to make an account to comment on your comment. This is Cracked, where most of the stuff written is satirical and hardly serious. For you to take this seriously has defeated the purpose of reading here. If I wanted the hardcore facts, I'd sit down to some Discovery Channel/National Geo or some other thing. Rather I'm here to read something funny and laugh. If what you want are facts/truth (other words for boring) go read the Newspaper or something.