the very, VERY large Hadron collider

This Onion story about the Very Large Earth Collider is hilarious for all the right reasons:

“There will always be Chicken Little types,” theoretical physicist and futurist Michio Kaku said. “When the first nuclear reaction was achieved, there were those who said its very existence made it a weapon of unspeakable power, and there is evidence they may have been right. It’s probably worth asking if the Very Large Earth Collider may in fact pose some minute danger to the Earth.”

While the project remains controversial, physicists agreed in late November to reconvene and evaluate the risk factor of the project after a small-scale field test, during which the Very Large Earth Collider will be turned on at 10 percent capacity, catapulting Earth into the moon at only half the speed of light.

Of course, since a hadron is just a bound state of quarks, then protons and neutrons are also hadrons (specifically, baryons which are a subset of hadrons). Which means that in a sense the Earth is a big hadron itself… hmm. Has anyone checked the website of the LHC to see just exactly what they have in mind?

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