CNN takes a moment away from reporting on missing airliners to bring us…

Will the ‘God particle’ destroy the world?

Short answer: probably not, but maybe.

My answer: it’s a big universe. Hell, it’s a big *galaxy,* and an old one. The probability is that many civilizations as advanced as ours sprang up in our own galaxy millions, even billions of years ago. And if the creation of Higgs particles bring with it the definite possibility of dropping the universe into a lower energy state – a process that would expand outwards at the speed of light from “ground zero” and would destroy every single particle – then it probably would have already happened by now.

Sci fi answer: sure, why not. Of course, since it’s a disaster mechanism that expands at the speed of light, not only can you not run away from it, but neither can you have any warning. The night sky would look perfectly normal, and then BLAMMO, you’ve evaporated. But here’s the hook for the story: assume this happens some time in the future, after we’ve invented hyperdrive, warp drive, jump engines, whatever. We can cross a hundred lightyears in an afternoon. Well, if some mad scientist sets off a Higgs Doomsday Device on Ceti Alpha V, the rest of the Federation wouldn’t know about it except for the sudden ending of subspace communications. Warp drive ships sent in would not report back. When someone finally starts piecing it together, an automated hyperdive ship is sent in, stopping every light-month to drop off a beacon that beeps in subspace. At some point the hyperdive ship vanishes, never to be heard from again. The Feds watch the beacons bleeping away, with one disappearing every month as the field expands.

Once they have it figured out, there’d be little choice but evacuation by their fastest ships. If you have meaningfully FTL ships, you can easily outrun the field… a jaunt of a thousand lightyears will give you a millenium of breathing room. And what to do during that millenium? Why… build a time machine, of course! Go back and stop the mad scientist, paradox be damned.

It’s the same old story.