We Should Have Funded SETI Rather Than the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider has finally started operations again. The largest scientific instruments ever created, the Large Hadron Collider or LHC is a gigantic 17-mile-long circular underground tunnel where scientists collide together particles that have been accelerated to enormous speeds. So far at least 9 billion dollars have been invested into this machine, and physicists claim that it is a great success. But the Large Hadron Collider has actually produced relatively modest results which haven't clearly justified its costs. The 9 billion dollars spent on the project would have been better spent on other scientific projects.

What has the LHC discovered so far? The only really big discovery was the verification of the existence of the Higgs Boson, a type of particle. But it seems this isn't an item that can justify the gigantic cost. Scientists already strongly suspected that the Higgs Boson existed before the Large Hadron Collider started operating, so the LHC didn't really discover the Higgs Boson. The LHC merely confirmed that the Higgs Boson exists, and that it has a particular mass.

While the Higgs Boson and its related Higgs field are important, it is unlikely that any great bonanza will be reaped from verifying the existence and mass of the Higgs Boson. The discovery of the electron led to the incredibly useful thing called electronics, but it is hard to imagine any useful new science or technology coming from the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs Boson. Why not? Because electrons are stable and abundant in our world, once we understood them, we could conveniently put them to our use. But the Higgs Boson only stays around for less than a sextillionth of a second,. It also requires fantastic amounts of energy to produce a single Higgs Boson. Give these facts, it seems hard to imagine any practical use that can be made of the Higgs Boson.

Even if something doesn't have much practical value, it might be justified to spend money on it if there is tremendous public interest. But in the case of the Higgs Boson, there is very little public interest. When scientists explain the Higgs Boson and the Higgs field that is related to it, they start getting into abstruse physics that the average person finds very hard to understand, and has very little interest in. From the standpoint of the average Joe, the Higgs Boson is a bore and a snooze.

Despite hyped-up stories about possible future discoveries, it is not likely that further runs of the Large Hadron Collider will produce much in the way of either practical discoveries or discoveries that the average person has much interest in. So it is easy to imagine science projects that would have been a better use of the 9 billion dollars used by the LHC. For example, the 9 billion dollars could have been spent on practical medical research that might have saved many lives and reduced much human suffering.

Another alternate use of the 9 billion dollars would have been to fully fund the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). When people talk about SETI, they are mainly talking about the construction and maintenance of large radio antennae designed to pick up radio signals transmitted by civilizations on other planets. Such projects have so far only been given funding of roughly a thousandth of the cost of the Large Hadron Collider. Making a full-scale effort at SETI would probably require several billion dollars. Such dollars have never been spent, partially because projects like the LHC are sucking up our science dollars.

A project such as SETI might produce results vastly more interesting than the results of the Large Hadron Collider. The average person devotes perhaps 10 minutes a year to reading about the results from the LHC. But if SETI were to succeed, and we were to start picking up radio signals from another civilization, it might be an entirely different matter. The results could easily include photos of some other planet which might be vastly more advanced than ours, photos which can be transmitted over radio wavelengths (yes, is it possible to transmit photos by radio, given a simple coding system in which particular radio blips stand for particular pixels). The results might even include television programs that originated on another planet. Such things would be an endless source of fascination that the average person might scan for hundreds of hours each year. If we had fully funded SETI, we might now be seeing headlines like the imaginary headline below.

We can also imagine the practical benefits that might accrue from picking up radio signals from extraterrestrials. Such benefits might be unlimited, since receiving radio signals from a civilization vastly more advanced than ours might allow us to improve our technology in thousands of different ways. But rather than fully funding a SETI project that might produce the greatest practical results combined with results of the greatest public interest, the decision was made instead to fund the Large Hadron Collider project, which has given us very little in the way of practical results, and results which are not of much interest to the general public. Why?

I can think of two reasons that may help explain it. One is the inflated authority that physicists have in our society, authority that may be excessive considering how many physicists these days are concentrating on cherished ethereal theories that haven't passed observational tests. Given such authority, people are reluctant to say no to physicists with billion-dollar wish lists. Another reason is our unreasonable tendency to shun ideas or projects that may be associated with the paranormal. Whenever large-scale funding for SETI is proposed, many will pull out their paranormal phobias, and start trying to use ridicule that includes comments about “little green men.” The same paranormal phobias that have inhibited discoveries about our own minds may be keeping us from making discoveries about minds very different from ours. 

Postscript:  By this post I don't mean to suggest that I am "anti-LHC," but merely that I think a full-scale SETI program would have been a better use of funds. I certainly appreciate the great work scientists are doing on the Large Hadron Collider, and I am very interested in the results it has achieved. I simply think that a full-scale SETI project might have produced results of much greater interest.  

Hyperdimensional Heist: A Science Fiction Story

The Large Hadron Collider uses so much energy that before it started running in 2008 many people were worried that this gigantic circular scientific device would produce a black hole that would destroy our entire planet. I'm not going to tell you that I used the Large Hadron Collider to destroy our entire planet. I'm merely going to tell you something a lot simpler and easier to believe, which is that I hacked the Large Hadron Collider and turned it into a machine for teleporting objects into the Fourth Dimension.

I could tell you the technical details of how I did it. I could tell you about how I discovered a variant of supersymmetry theory which postulated a Fourth Dimension we could actually reach from our planet, by applying sufficient energy. I could tell you about how I hacked into the software used by the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, so that I could secretly use some of its enormous energy to teleport objects into the Fourth Dimension. I could go into the details of the mathematics, which would quickly make your head hurt. I could tell you about the small electronic gizmos I added in a few places of the Large Hadron Collider, additions which no one noticed because there were already miles of electronic machinery inside its vast circular shape. But I'll spare you that discussion. Just take my word for it: by the time I had finished all my secret shenanigans, I had created a device allowing me to send any object from our familiar world to the mysterious Fourth Dimension. I was the only person in the world who knew about this functionality.

I remember the first time I did a teleportation. I used my computer at the Large Hadron Collider, the computer in my little private office. I logged in to the computer program I had written, and clicked on some buttons allowing me to secretly steal some of the energy of the Large Hadron Collider. I then specified some spatial coordinates for the object I wanted to teleport to the Fourth Dimension. The spatial coordinates were for a tree I could see out of my office window. I pressed the Teleport button on my software screen, and then I looked out the window. The tree was gone.

But at this point I didn't really know that the object had gone to the Fourth Dimension, because I hadn't yet actually gone to the Fourth Dimension, and seen the tree over there. So I figured what I needed to do was teleport myself to the Fourth Dimension, to verify its existence with my own eyes. This raised a tricky issue: once I teleported myself to the Fourth Dimension, how could I get back to our world? My solution was to add to my computer interface some functionality that would allow me to specify a return time for any object I teleported to the Fourth Dimension. So if I wanted to transport an object permanently into the Fourth Dimension, I would just not specify a return time, and the object would stay over there forever. But if I wanted to transport myself for an hour to the Fourth Dimension, I would specify a return time one hour into the future, insuring that I would stay over there for only one hour.

Using my improved interface, I specified my own spatial coordinates, and I specified a return time one hour into the future. I pressed the Teleport button on my screen. Then it happened. I was no longer in our world. I was in the Fourth Dimension. The teleportation had worked.

I looked all around and saw nothing but a flat featureless plane. On the flat plane I could see no objects except for one thing: the tree I had teleported from outside my office window. I was delighted. The teleportation had worked just as I had hoped.

I had specified on my computer screen that my teleportation should only last for one hour. I had teleported at 6:00 PM, and I expected to be teleported back at 7:00 PM. I looked at my watch very nervously as the time approached 7:00 PM. Would it work as I expected, or would I be stuck alone in the Fourth Dimension?

To my delight exactly at 7:00 PM I was teleported back to my office. Everything had worked exactly as I had hoped.

Having proven that the Fourth Dimension was real, and that I could reach it, I wondered what to do next. Should I tell my bosses at the Large Hadron Collider that I had developed the most astonishing breakthrough in scientific history? I considered that, but I figured that it would not be very profitable to me. Sure, I would be able to write a book, and do a profitable speaking tour, but I longed for greater riches.

It was then that I realized that I could use my invention to become wealthy beyond my wildest dreams.

It was so simple. All that I had to do was to use my invention to teleport some of the world's greatest riches into the Fourth Dimension. Then I would have those riches to use however I wished. No one would be able to discover that I had stolen the riches, because I was the only one who knew how to get to the Fourth Dimension.

I decided to start with the Mona Lisa, one of the world's most famous paintings. On the internet I got the exact spatial coordinates of the Louvre Museum in Paris, and all of its rooms. I was then able to determine the exact spatial coordinates for the spot where the Mona Lisa hung in the Louvre Museum. I typed in the coordinates on my computer screen, and pressed the Teleport button. At first I had no idea whether it had worked. But that night I heard on the television news that Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting the Mona Lisa had vanished from the Louvre Museum. I assumed I had successfully teleported the painting into the Fourth Dimension.

I then figured that I would like to own a nice diamond. I tried to remember the names of any diamonds, and I could remember only one: the Hope Diamond, a beautiful grayish-blue diamond of 45 carats. After some research on the internet, I was able to find out the exact spatial coordinates of the spot where the Hope Diamond was stored. I typed in the coordinates on my computer screen, and pressed the Teleport button. The next day it was announced that the Hope Diamond had mysteriously disappeared.

Using the same technique, I teleported into the Fourth Dimension five tons of gold bricks from a Federal Reserve Bank, and twenty million dollars in unmarked bills from a bank in New York.

I then longed to touch with my own hands the riches I had stolen. So using the same computer screen I had used before, I specified the spatial coordinates of my own location. As soon as I pressed the Teleport button, I was instantly transported back to the Fourth Dimension.

I looked around, and saw everything that I expected to see. There was the same featureless plane I had seen before. On the plane were all the things I had teleported to the Fourth Dimension: the tree, the Mona Lisa, the Hope Diamond, the five tons of gold bricks, and the twenty million dollars in unmarked cash. 

I went up to the Hope Diamond, and picked it up in my hand. I held the Mona Lisa in my hands, and gently touched the edge of the canvas.

Putting the painting down, I looked at my watch, and asked myself: now what was it that I had specified as the return hour when I would be teleported back to my office? It was 6:15 PM, and I thought I must have typed in a return time of 7:00 PM just as I had done on my first trip to the Fourth Dimension.

But then 7:00 PM came and went. I will still there in the Fourth Dimension. I then realized to my horror: when I had used my computer screen in my office I had failed to type in a return time.

My computer program had no provision at all for a default return time. I could have programmed in such a feature easily enough, but I had neglected to do it. My failure to type in a return time meant one thing: I would never return from the Fourth Dimension.

I looked around the featureless plane on which I stood. There was no food or water anywhere. I could keep walking along the featureless plane, but would be unlikely to find anything that would save my life. I was doomed.

I wrote these words down as a record for anyone who discovers my lifeless body here in the Fourth Dimension. If you are reading these words, I guess you have also reached the Fourth Dimension. I hope you have some way to get out of it.

How could I have been so stupid as to have failed to type in my return time on my computer screen? I have one explanation.

It's simple. It is an old curse. I dimly recall it now. There is a curse involving the Hope Diamond. The Hope Diamond was first stolen from the eye of a sacred Hindu idol in India. From that moment, the Hope Diamond has brought doom to every person who tried to take it as his own. I am the latest victim of this old curse.