A new laser is to be built that is as powerful as “concentrating the rays of the sun for the entire earth onto the tip of a pen”. Scientists claim it could allow them boil the very fabric of space, AKA the vacuum. Because that’s a fantastic idea. It is official, mankind has a death-wish.

They are claiming that the purpose is to better understand “fundamental questions about the universe”, like finding out whether other dimensions exist etc.

According to them, a vacuum is not devoid of material, but is in fact comprised of tiny mysterious particles that pop in and out of existence, at speeds so fast that no one has been able to prove they exist.

The universe is made up of matter and anti-matter also known as “ghost particles”. These particles, normally annihilate one another as soon as they appear, but by using the laser to pull them apart, physicists believe they will be able to detect them, by revealing what so called dark matter really is.

The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) will be 200 times more powerful than the most powerful lasers currently in existence, and will allow scientists to reveal these particles and effectively tear the vacuum apart. And, most likely kill the lot of us by creating a black hole, right next to earth.

Rest assured, the cost for our own destruction, won’t hurt the economy that much,with a price tag of only £1 billion (maybe we should just aim it at Greece).

This next fact might upset the impoverished people of the world, and perhaps the residents of Orangezicht, paying inflated amounts of money (thanks Eskom) for power.

The Ultra-High Field laser will be made up of 10 beams, each twice as powerful as the prototype lasers, allowing it to produce 200 petawatts of power – more than 100,000 times the power of the world’s combined electricity production – for less than a trillionth of a second.

Yeah! So with that tidbit of wasteful, dangerous mad science, I leave you to ponder -WTF are we humans doing?

[Source: telegraph]