I wonder if ignorance really is bliss

[chickenfeet]

This gem appears as a comment to an article at www.theglobeandmail.com (Canada's National Newspaper!) in response to a not very good article about the search for the Higgs boson:

Jennifer Trueman from Gold River, Canada writes:
The possibility of creating a type of matter that swallows up the world as we know it is nothing to make light of. I have visited the area around the particle accelerator in Switzerland and France, and most of the people there are terrified of the possibility. Real estate values have plummeted, as people there know that should something go wrong and a black hole is created, they will be the first to go.

This has the potential to do massive damage to the global economy, and should it come to pass, there truly is no doubt -- every factory, every set of Parliament buildings, indeed, every mall and school will need to be rebuilt!

This is far bigger than the nebulous unproven concept of global warming. We need to stop it now.

The sheer bloody stupidity and ignorance of this comment is quite staggering. In the impossible event that the LHC produced a black hole big enough to suck in anything outside the collision chamber, property values would be the least of anyone's concerns, at least in the minute fraction of a second they had to have concerns.

Comments

[gillo]

Good grief. This is stupid beyond all deeply stupid. And I just don't believe it of people in the vicinity of CERN - it's not as if the complex is newly-built.

Ifthey did accidentally create a black hole (And one has to ask how the F*&$ they could) it would be property values in the local spiral arm that would go to pot, not just the area around Geneva.

Sheesh. I don't have an icon that means stupid enough.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

it's not as if the complex is newly-built.

Well quite. I rented Wojtek Zakzrewski's house while he was off at CERN when you and I were young!

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Maybe she's planning to engage in real estate transactions in that tiny fraction of a second! Commerce is very important in the final fraction of a second of the planet, no?

(This is one of those comments that skates at the boundary between the "Astrology for Dummies" icon and the Lenin icon.

[arcana-mundi.livejournal.com]

Nice to know that general stupidity continues to outpace scientific production of factses and bookses. The crazy.

[sabotabby]

Aww, is someone getting her science from Star Trek and Bill O'Reilly?

[krustukles.livejournal.com]

I love that when someone is offered the opportunity to comprehend the mysteries of the cosmos they fret about property values. There has to be a Kurt Vonnegut-esque commentary in there somewhere.

[mehdi-caps.livejournal.com]

There's already a black hole in the skull of Jennifer Trueman, it seems.

[metalana.livejournal.com]

You sure it wasn't a joke?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

It's impossible to be sure I suppose but the rest of the comments thread was almost as unenlightened.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

OMG, that is so funny. I mean, really funny.

And scary too.

But I'm still laughing at property values...

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

Clearly, it's one of those safely contained bits of anti-matter that powers the Enterprise. I think there is some kind of rule that good sf must still abide by the laws of physics. Must ask chilperic -- he'd know.