Word: strangelets
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RHIC, which generates high-energy subatomic collisions between gold ions, quietly opened for business in 2000. Even RHIC’s sharpest opponents calculate the risk of a world-ending “strangelet scenario” to be very, very small. According to Posner, an upper-bound estimate of the danger of a strangelet disaster is 1 in 500,000 over the 10-year period for which RHIC will be in operation. An alternative estimate from Swiss and Israeli scientists puts the danger at 1 in 500 million. But although the likelihood of a strangelet catastrophe is minimal, should...
Posner takes a midpoint between the two disaster estimates, and he posits—for the sake of argument—that the likelihood of a world-ending strangelet scenario over the next decade is 1 in 10 million. In other words, there’s a 1 in 10 million chance that 6 billion people will die at some point in the next decade because of RHIC. Thus on average, we would expect RHIC to kill 60 people per year. Is that a sacrifice we should be willing to make to push the frontiers of physics forward...
After reading Catastrophe, I spent several sleepless nights worrying about the 600 innocent souls who—in our hypothetical world of risk-benefit analysis—will be swallowed alive by an out-of-control strangelet sometime in the next decade. I was so furious that I started rounding up fellow socially-minded Harvardians to head to RHIC’s Upton, N.Y. home and protest this travesty. In a fearful fury, I decided to check with Harvard’s crack team of experimental high energy physicists to see whether Posner’s calculations are on-target...
...conditions in RHIC could produce a strangelet disaster, physicists argue, then we would probably be dead already...
...benefit analysis is only useful if the risk is non-zero,” Feldman wrote in an e-mail. “But in the strangelet scenario, “the risk is sufficiently close to zero that risk-benefit analysis is not helpful...