Crash course

The world could have quite literally ended Wednesday morning, and chances are you had no idea anything deadly was even happening.

A doomsday situation involving a global catastrophe or the appearance of an enormous black hole was actually possible. But again, you more than likely had no clue about any of this.

It’s extremely disappointing that the majority of the mainstream media glossed over the fact that scientists flipped on the largest, most powerful particle-blaster in history 100 meters underground early Wednesday morning.

Sure, it’s a science story, and the general public doesn’t like or know much about science. Heck, I normally could care less about it. But a lot of people legitimately feared this thing, the Large Hadron Collider, could have messed up our entire planet.
And although it didn’t rip the space-time continuum to pieces or cause an electromagnetic imbalance requiring a person to push a button every 108 minutes to save the world, the LHC story should have been covered more.

There was definitely major conflict to cover. The $8 billion project has been constructed and planned throughout the last 14 years by CERN underneath the French-Swiss border, and there have been different attempts to get it axed throughout. Most recently, one group of individuals filed an injunction to get the startup pushed back due to safety concerns, while another filed a human rights suit due to the LHC’s possible effects on the world.

Controversies aside, this thing is obviously a crucial development in the physics field. Once this bad boy reaches full power in the coming months, the protons in the LHC will be throttling at 99.999999 percent the speed of light. During its highest output, there will be 14 trillion electron volts pumping out. The people operating the LHC are honestly looking to re-create the Big Bang.

Why isn’t that appealing? The LHC is one of the coolest (and perhaps deadliest) scientific inventions to in recent memory.

Why weren’t any talking heads yelping out about how this could end the world or how it could change it? Couldn’t someone have covered the angle where some stringent religious people said it was worthless to re-create the Big Bang because it didn’t happen in the first place?

Either way, if there was ever a time for the media to pick up on a science story, it should have been now. The LHC was mentioned sparingly by the mainstream media until two days before it was turned on, but it really could have been a huge story. Maybe in October when it really fires up, it will get more coverage.

It’s clear how little we care about scientific advancements in this world. The whole place could have been ripped into a dark spacey abyss, and it still couldn’t beat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy for space in the news.