COLUMN: Things better not seen or known
Sausage production and political decision making always come to the top of lists of things people say you don’t want to see, but the list is growing. There is just too much to know and we only stay that millimeter on the good side of sanity by pushing a lot of things into the background; daily news for example. I was about halfway through cooking dinner Tuesday when this cheery bit of information came on the radio. Being that it was April 1, I checked to make sure it wasn’t a sick April Fool’s Day joke. Unfortunately it’s not. “The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in which the colliding protons will re-create energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the big bang (the beginning of the universe unless you are a creationist)… … Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho (other physicists) contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they said, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” This pretty much trumps sausage making, though black holes do remind me of politics. This is actually one of those cases that it does take a rocket scientist to figure out. I wish I knew one, because I suspect that “eating the earth” is not the scientific term and becoming “strange matter” is also a little vague. You would think this sort of impending doom would put things in perspective but there are plenty of other things to worry about in the event the planet isn’t eaten by tiny black holes. Besides, nobody really knows what being eaten by a black hole might feel like. Every day doom is more pressing for most of us. I’m planning to take an airline trip soon and I was curious to find out what condition our airlines are in. It turns out that the average age of commercial airliners is 12-18 years. Take a quick look at your driveway. I’ve had some cars that were 18 years old and I wouldn’t trust them to make it to Salt Lake City and back. This on top of recent stories about undetected cracks in airplanes, major airline bankruptcies and the general surliness of airline employees, should give one pause. That’s why the Internet and 24-hour news are evil. With a little time and skill, you can find out, and in most cases see, anything. It could be that the world is a better, cleaner, shinier place than at any time in history, it just doesn’t seem so because there is so much news and information out there telling us otherwise. To put it in perspective, the decline and eventual extinction of dinosaurs would probably have been pretty frightening news if there had been news.
Dennis Hinkamp would also like to point out that there really aren’t monsters under your bed … or are there? Comments and questions can be sent to him at dennish@ext.usu.edu.