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LHC Reaches Record Energy
toruonu writes "Yesterday evening the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for the first time accelerated protons in both directions of the ring to 1.18 TeV. Even though the 1 TeV barrier per beam was first broken a week ago, this marks the first time that the beam was in the machine in both directions at the same time, allowing possibly for collisions at a center of mass energy of 2.36 TeV. Although the test lasted mere minutes, it was enough to have detectors record the very first events at 2.36 TeV. LHC passes Tevatron (the particle collider at Fermilab that operates at 1.96 TeV) and becomes the highest energy particle collider in the world (so far it was effectively just the highest energy storage ring...)"
A greater understanding of physics may well be worth the excessive use of energy, as it may lead to better sources of energy tomorrow.
Lately I've been wondering how worthwhile attempts to e.g. stop climate change are when, if Kurzweil is right, we'll hit the Singularity in only a couple of decades and then all of humanity's environmental and technological problems may well be solved.
Nobody agrees on when the singularity is coming. We're nowhere near producing an innovative AI, let alone anything genuinely intelligent in software, so technological progress is stuck going through human systems for a while yet. I am more inclined to believe the predictions that technological advances will start coming too fast for humans to follow in centuries to come, not decades. Our job is to make sure that civilisation doesn't fall apart in a mess of overpopulation and resource shortage before then. Global warming carries with it a huge risk of reducing food supplies below that that we'll need in order to ever reach the point of singularity.