The origin of black holes

At lunch today, I discussed an article that has been passed around about a new supercollider in development that had the potential to trigger the discovery of new subatomic particles. It also has the (acknowledged to be true by its developers) minute chance of creating a black hole that could consume the Earth.

This possibility seems to provoke one of two reactions from people:

1. "Why the hell would you want to create something that had even the slightest chance of killing all known life?!?!"

2. "Oh, cool. Yeah, why not?"

I belong to the latter group. I mean, there's always the possibility of some real discoveries arising from this - not just new particles that nobody cares about except fringe lunatic scientists, but maybe they'll find a new energy source or something useful.

There's also a feeling that I started to feel that I haven't felt since the end of the Cold War. I was just on the cusp of a generation of Americans that grew up with a Doomsday mindset. The logical thing to think at that time of nuclear deterrence was that eventually, one of us was going to make a mistake and launch a missile, triggering a domino effect of world-wide apocalypse. Sure, it was a little scary, but it was fun, too, and it kind of freed you, to some degree, from the responsibility of your actions. If we're all likely to die in some nuclear disaster, you think, what does it matter what I do today? My wife is 5 years younger than I and doesn't remember this mentality - this thrilling game of Global Chicken - a Mexican standoff where we had nuclear missiles instead of pistolas pointed at each others head.

It reminded me very much of Dr. Strangelove, and how I loved that movie. The brilliance of that movie was the comedy that played out from the advocates of the brutal logic of nuclear deterrence - everything that every character said made sense with respect to the context it was in (except for the Purity of Essence speech by General Ripper, which was pure comedic gold), but if you look at it from the outside, you can see the silly suicidal pact that it was.

Anyway, as I was mulling over the idea of parallel universes and in how many parallel universes we would be creating this supercollider and accidentally killing ourselves in, of all things, an esoteric scientific experiment gone wrong, a funny thought occurred to me.

What if all the black holes that we see out there now are remnants of ancient civilizations, whose evolution followed the same course as ours until they decided to create their own supercolliders and turn on that button?

The idea amuses me so much that I've decided it must be true. And we're next! Off to oblivion!

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when...