It’s a true-life parable from the dawn of the atomic age. In the mid forties, Manhattan project physicist Arthur Compton worried that the nuclear test at the Trinity test site might ignite Earth’s atmosphere. Oxygen is an extremely reactive gas, and Compton was concerned that an atmospheric nuclear test might set off a worldwide firestorm.
There was no consensus among the esteemed scientists on the odds. It just seemed very unlikely. But no one - not Robert Oppenheimer, not Edward Teller, not Richard Feynman - could guarantee the skies wouldn’t explode into flame from the New Mexico blast, like a chain smoker in an oxygen tent.
Without full understanding of the biosphere, and how O2 is in delicate balance with CO2 and N2, the brain trust stationed at Los Alamos rolled the dice. They lit the fuse and lit the skies - but luckily without torching the entire atmosphere.
James Conant, who directly experienced the intense heat of the Trinity fireball, recalled how he momentarily suspected they had lost the gamble:
Then came a burst of white light that seemed to fill the sky and seemed to last for seconds. I had expected a relatively quick and bright flash. The enormity of the light and its length quite stunned me. My instantaneous reaction was that something had gone wrong and that the thermal nuclear [sic] transformational of the atmosphere, once discussed as a possibility and jokingly referred to a few minutes earlier, had actually occurred.
So from this anecdote at least, it appears that other Manhattan Project physicists besides Conant were concerned about the possibility of an atmospheric ignition. And perhaps nervous enough to joke about it minutes before the detonation. Talk about whistling past the graveyard.
Like Conant, Los Alamos Laboratory director Robert Oppenheimer was famously present for the flash. His legendary quote from the Bhagavad Gita would have even more force if he and his colleagues had rolled snake eyes. Of course Oppy wouldn’t have been around to say it into any cameras for anyone still alive.
By the late forties atomic blasts were re-imagined as seriously hip events, with Las Vegas gamblers enjoying martinis on casino rooftops as they ‘safely’ took in the sight of mushroom clouds from a Nevada test site 65 miles away. In true American fashion, the gambling mecca went for atomic tourism for a stretch. I am become Death, the arranger of tour packages.
Like water into ice
There was supposedly a weird echo of the Manhattan Project’s gamble a half century later involving the Large Hadron Collider, an immense superconducting magnetic ring constructed on the Swiss-French border to smash subatomic particles together at near-light speeds. Before and after LHC made its name detecting the Higgs particle in 2012, there was concern that it may not just wreck the planet, but the whole damn universe.
I always thought this was giving humans a bit too much credit for cosmic catastrophe. Yet this peculiar notion wasn’t rejected out of hand by all scientists. A decade prior to LHC’s startup in 2008, Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal and a research professor at Cambridge, speculated that the space we live in might go into a “phase transition,” like water into ice, if an appropriate event were introduced.
“Maybe some trigger (which) could transform the whole of space into some quite different state,” he mused in conversation with literary agent John Brockman. “Could physicists, by an experiment done in an accelerator, trigger this effect by inadvertently producing a bubble of the new vacuum, which would then expand at the speed of light and engulf the universe?”
This might appear absurd, but it's easy to think of ways in which we've produced conditions that have never existed naturally anywhere. For instance, there was never anything in the universe colder than 2.7 degrees above absolute zero — the present temperature of the microwave background — until we made refrigerators (unless, that is, there's intelligent life elsewhere). The kind of thing that might create "dangerous" conditions would be a collision between very-high energy particles in a big accelerator; such a collision might create a big local energy density of just the kind that might trigger a phase transition.
Rees wasn’t the only physicist to consider this possibility, though it was very much a minority view. Me, I’ve never been one to worry about getting turned inside out like a reversible jacket by some hyper-dimensional origami. This was the nineties, after all, an era of relative peace, sanity and scientific caution compared to now. Rightly or wrongly, the biggest bombs we feared weren’t from Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, but from Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer.
But I digress. The larger point remains: the backers of big science have a nasty habit of blasting ahead full cylinders, unleashing dislocating new tech to the masses like delinquents tossing beer cans out a car window. Any potential fallout, radioactive or otherwise, is for the roadside cleanup crews.
This has been the case from DDT to thalidomide to endocrine disruptors to GMO foods to mRNA gene therapy (cleverly and cynically rebranded as “vaccines”) to ChatGPT and the self-improving suite of AI tools that threaten to send desk jobs the way of horse-drawn buggies and whalebone corsets. We the Sheeple get little to no say in the matter. Legislation and lawsuits can come later, if ever. It’s rear view mirror stuff to the delinquents in the car.
Phase Transition Redux
Since the invention of the atomic bomb, the doctrine of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) has hung over humanity’s head like the Sword of Damocles. There have been an surprising number of nuclear close calls from the fifties on, through a combination of misinterpreted signals and itchy trigger fingers. And though it is now unfashionable to recall, there were even two instances where civilization narrowly avoided destruction by the action - or rather, non-action - of Russian commanders.
Perhaps with MAD ratcheting up between the US and Russia through the Ukraine proxy war, there’s still a narrow chance for the delinquents to set fire to the whole damn sky. However, the smart money is still on nuclear winter.
But what about the supposed threat that superconducting plaything of particle physicists, the Large Hadron Collider? I recall reading one tongue-in-cheek piece claiming the LHC did indeed mess up space-time sometime around 2008 to 2016, taking us into a surreal universe we occupy today. This would certainly make for an awesome Netflix series premise…
In any case, back in the late nineties Martin Rees sat down with a Dutch astrophysicist and crunched numbers on his ‘phrase transition’ threat. His conclusion: “You’d have to go a long way beyond the collision energies expected in supercolliders before there was any risk of Doomsday.”
Oh, good. But wait…Britain’s Astronomer Royal can’t fully let go of this theorized threat. In his 2018 book, On the Future: Prospects For Humanity, Rees speculates that particle accelerator tests could generate “strange matter” that reduces our planet to a ball 300 feet across. Alternatively, the tests could whip up a microscopic black hole that would gnaw away on Earth like Fargo’s wood chipper on Steve Buscemi. In the most disturbing scenario, the subatomic experiments could cause space-time itself to decay into another form, wiping out everything recognizable as this universe.
Rees does qualify all this, again saying such scenarios are unlikely. What a relief! Me, I’m focused more and clear and present dangers closer to home. Like how public health policy was hijacked three years ago by governmental/pharmaceutical delinquents and their proxies in the legacy press. But that’s just me. You have worries of your own.
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Yuval has become entranced by that vision, shame on him. Besides that, the entire discussion about the putative power to 'think' that the robots supposedly will acquire fails the most basic of philosophical tests, which is, define your terms. We can't even define what 'thinking' is, so the whole argument devolves into a morass of unreason...I remain a sceptic when it comes to the power of the AI revolution. It is over hyped and misunderstood. Just saying....
Wow! Those cartoons are fantastic. And that old advert for bomb-watching looks like it could be one of yours, but I suspect it’s vintage legit.
While we may not have blown ourselves up, yet that is, the mere knowledge of our potential to do so has created a perpetual fire storm in the soul of humankind. It can be a healthy one though, if we always have it in the back of our minds that such a conflagration underlies the entire universal mechanism. On this plane perhaps the post- war, “heating up” of the mechanistic worldview has created a bunch of smaller separate storms in multiple areas of life and around the earth itself- toxins, mind viruses, and the contained, targeted letting off of steam, so in spite of the vast and visible threats, we can still imagine that that we are safe enough to make it through the next day