Reckless endangerment?

By Ron Seigel Today we are facing a serious financial deficit. Public officials are actually talking about cutting social security and medicare, taking food and medicine from our senior citizens. Ironically no one in Washington seems to be protesting the fact that we taxpayers are spending more than $70 million dollars a year on a program that endangers us. This money is going into a gigantic nuclear contraption called the Large Hadron Collider. It not only costs us $73 million a year, but it cost us more than half a billion dollars to construct. No one pretends this nuclear machine is going to help our national defense. The collider is being built by an international European organization in Switzerland called the Counsel Europeen pour Recherche Nucleaire (CERN for short). The U.S. does not belong to it, has no voice in it and no say about the machine's safety procedures. The purpose of the machine is to conduct an exotic experiment. A number of scientists believe that the universe came into being through a "Big Bang." The collider was designed to create a miniature version of the "Big Bang." No one has listed any specific benefits of doing this. Some have warned of serious environmental catastrophes. Around 2009 German physicist Rainer Plaga warned that the collider may produce the same amount of energy as major hydrogen bombs exploding every other second next to CERN headquarters in Switzerland. This, he warned, might result in "a magnitude of global warming like never before" and earthquakes throughout the world. Physicist Walter Wagner states the collider is not at full power yet. However, this year we have had earthquakes in unusual places, including one frighteningly close to Washington, D.C. Wagner declares that once the collider is in full operation, we might face something far more frightening. One of the black holes it creates might grow big enough to swallow the entire earth. A group of scientists have declared in a court brief that this is "unlikely" or "very unlikely." That is precisely what respected experts were saying about the possibility of an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Wagner maintained in a counter brief that there are "numerous scientists" who dispute this rosy picture. However, even saying it is unlikely, represents an admission that this Big Bang experiment is a gamble with our lives and the best its supporters can do is to assure us the odds are on our side. It is clear that we are endangered and the only question is to the degree the danger exists. If I were a parent, I would not want to play the odds with the life of my child. While this is not "reckless endangerment" in the legal sense, it certainly is in the moral sense. It is hard to see how we mortal beings can even begin to calculate the odds. The Big Bang, if it ever occurred, took place before our planet existed and we never got a chance to study or even get near a black hole. Issac Asimov wrote decades ago, "we have no way of telling whether any of the laws of nature...can hold under the extreme conditions of a black hole." Wagner wants to delay the project until an independent board of scientists can review the project's safety and its impact on the environment. He wisely defined an independent board as one where the majority of members has no past or present ties to the organization doing the project. One wonders why this is not common procedure for any government funded research project. A larger question is why build the thing at all. Why risk the abrupt disappearance of all our ideas, poetry, literature, and music, all love and friendship, and even moments of warmth among casual acquaintances, all laughter and fun, all our achievements, including scientific achievements? Why risk leaving things so that even aliens from other planets passing by will have no sign of our planet and no record of what we thought and felt and did? Are there not better things to spend our money on? With the failure of Congress to balance the budget, President Obama plans to cut funding in all areas by 10 percent. The Large Hadron Collider was a carry over from President George Bush's administration. It might be time for citizens to tell President Obama to stop carrying it. It might be good to call the President's White House Comment Line at (202) 456-1111 and tell him, "Cut every cent from the Large Hadron Collider. Don't risk throwing our tax dollars into a black hole." Published: Wed, Dec 14, 2011