Colliders!

 The Abandoned SSC site at Waxahachie, Texas

The End of Science

I was reading Arsen's post on elementary particle physics:

Elementary, My Dear Watson
http://arsendarnay.blogspot.com/2011/10/elementary-my-dear-watson.html

and I had a funny experience about the LHC - Large Hadron Collider which is run by CERN in Europe... and actually exists in this space-time - and the SSC, or Superconducting Super Collider, which the US was supposed to build in Texas, and which was supposed to slam particles together at three times the energies of the LHC.
The SSC idea was abandoned, and the site is a moldering ruin.

Not a Book of Eli ruin, not a Canticle for Leibowitz ruin, not a metaphor for anything... just a ruin.

In the meantime, we spent far more on our wars than was ever dreamed of for the SSC, but that's how the quarks crumble.....

Then....

... then, after the SSC had been completed, and the Higg's Boson had been either discovered or decisively proven not to exist, and particle physics and quantum mechanics had digested all this, there had been a flowering of peaceful pursuits...
This followed on the discovery of warp drive and terraforming and the beginning of a plan to settle Mars...
Most of the Palestinian gave up on their olive groves and emigrated to Mars, and within ten years the Palestinian settlements, now far from the madding crowds and the occupation armies, grew with luxurious richness. Others followed, since Mars was a big planet, and they joined into a planet-wide confederation that outlawed weapons of war.

Back on Earth, the eyes of the covetous looked at the Red Planet with lustful acquisitiveness, and cursed the settlements of the Palestinian diaspora and those of the other wandering poor who had settled Mars, and began to make plans to conquer it...

All because of the SSC! Good thing we gave up on it in 1993! Most of the stuff we've given up on were all b.s.

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