Kudos to Advanced Technology and Knowledge

The Europeans are jumping on technology to advance our knowledge of the world and space while the US argues about morality in the upcoming elections. The Large Hadron Collider is a machine that sends beams of protons at nearly the speed of light. The machine will create a scenario where protons slam into each other and scientists expect that the particles will melt into energy up to 100,000 times hotter than the sun's core — kind of like how the universe is thought to have come into existence. This explains how something with no mass can become particle masses, and so life begins, perhaps.

From a nuclear physicist (my brother), a quote: "the collider: It's purpose is to accelerate subatomic particles to higher velocities than they've ever done before, and to collide them so they can look for other subatomic particles that have never been seen before --certain theoretical atomic entities can only come into existence in the aftermath of extremely high energy collisions. The big thing in the news is that some people say the collisions will create mini black holes that will swallow the Earth. Poppycock. There are a lot of smart scientists that work on accelerators, they love mother Earth as much as anybody, and they would not do something that would destroy the planet. The danger was considered, some calculations were done, and it was determined that is was not possible. But some wackos took off with the idea, and have made a big deal about it."

So there you go, all you doomsdayer freaks who are afraid of change or knowledge--you need therapy.

Meanwhile, in the United States, we are cutting back on research and have been doing so for quite some time, to pour our dollars into a war about oil instead of focusing on new energy options. Promises are made to increase our research budgets, but then fall through the inevitable cracks of politics, and the research dollars never actually surface.

Note: Update - apparently we do have the technology but the military and government have first dibs on it.