Freewill
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- Oct 26, 2011
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Accelerator production[edit]
At heavy ion accelerators like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), nuclei are collided at relativistic speeds, creating strange and antistrange quarks which could conceivably lead to strangelet production. The experimental signature of a strangelet would be its very high ratio of mass to charge, which would cause its trajectory in a magnetic field to be very nearly, but not quite, straight. The STAR collaboration has searched for strangelets produced at the RHIC,[7] but none were found. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is even less likely to produce strangelets,[8] but searches are planned[9] for the LHC ALICE detector.
Dangers[edit]
If the strange matter hypothesis is correct and its surface tension is larger than the aforementioned critical value, then a larger strangelet would be more stable than a smaller one. One speculation that has resulted from the idea is that a strangelet coming into contact with a lump of ordinary matter could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter.[14][15] This "ice-nine"-like disaster scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter.
Strangelet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Grey goo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Grey goo (also spelled gray goo) is a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all matter on Earth while building more of themselves,[1][2] a scenario that has been called ecophagy ("eating the environment").[3] The original idea assumed machines were designed to have this capability, while popularizations have assumed that machines might somehow gain this capability by accident."
There were scientists that predicted that the first atomic bomb explosion would be the end of the world. I am assuming they were wrong.