The temptation to speed past them all had to be resisted because that part of the base is shoot-to-kill for vehicles violating the 30-mile-per-hour speed limit or any of the other traffic laws.
Over the past five years we have received considerable support and encouragement from Kirtland Air Force Base, a Department of Defense facility, and from Sandia National Laboratories, a Department of Energy facility responsible for, among other things, the construction and maintenance of every nuclear warhead in the United States.
For the record, neither AC2, Kirtland Air Force Base, nor Sandia National Laboratories, nor any employees or contractual workers associated with those entities are known to take any position whatsoever on predictions concerning the year 2012.
YOU DON’T NEED dire predictions about Apocalypse 2012 to freak out a little about all the weird stuff we’ve invented that could destroy the world. More than enough biochemical weapons are stockpiled around the globe, starting with mustard gas, a deadly paralytic agent left over from World War I, on through anthrax, sarin, and a variety of other classified compounds, to keep the Vulcan incinerating for many years to come. And the good news/bad news is that there will be even more incredibly toxic stuff to burn up in the future, at least according to those who share the fears voiced by Stephen Hawking, who believes that humankind will extinguish itself from the face of the planet through the misuse of biological weapons:
“I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet,” Hawking told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, expressed the opinion that the threat was not so much from a Cold War-style nuclear holocaust as from a more insidious form. “In the long term, I am more worried about biology. Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab.”
What manner of vile pestilence will renegade eggheads concoct with their gene splicers? They might try to “improve” upon the worst Nature has to offer. For example, some of the latest strains of superbacteria have an enzyme called VIM-2 that breaks down antibiotics. Genetically enhancing the VIM-2 enzyme could give the resulting superorganism a head start so big that antibiotics could never catch up. Perhaps the gene-splicing sociopaths will create “priobots.” By bolstering the already formidable self-replicating abilities of prions, these new predatory proteins could turn our brains into useless sponges through Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, also known as mad cow disease. The priobots might also cause an epidemic of kuru, a brain disorder in which cannibals have been known to giggle themselves to death. How’s that for an evil genius’s last laugh?
Even if we catch these malefactors before they can do harm, the poisons that they cook up will have to be disposed of. But there’s no furnace hot enough to burn up such compounds without leaving toxic residue. That’s the niche that Vulcan seeks to fill. It just might save the world after all. That is, as long as it doesn’t explode. Since it’s planned as the hottest furnace in the world and filled with deadly waste materials, we’ve had to make damn sure the device is stable and secure. In fact, Vulcan’s underlying plasma containment technology has potential applications as a rocket thruster: basically, you just take one end off the containment tube, and zoom, the unit takes off. Upon command, presumably.
ATOM SMASHING
Running a Vulcan furnace requires a megawatt of direct electrical power, enough to run about 25 contemporary, standard, three-bedroom homes, or 200 rent-controlled apartments in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Victor Simuoli and I planned to construct our atom smasher for the annual Junior High School 51 science fair. The Atomic Energy Commission had kindly sent us the plans for a linear accelerator, a device that propels subatomic particles from either end toward the middle and then smashes them into each other head-on at terrific speeds. Seeing how incredibly complicated the blueprints were, and how running the atom smasher would probably have shorted out the whole neighborhood, Victor and I settled, as I recall, for making a crystal radio receiver out of a cigar box.
We probably wouldn’t have given up so easily if we knew there was a possibility that our atom smasher could potentially create a tiny black hole that would eventually destroy the world. Not, mind you, that we were pre-Columbine or anything, just that, as two nerdy adolescents, the temptation of unleashing Star Trek-scale forces would have been hard to resist.
Though our machine would have been way too small to punch a black hole into space-time, the same cannot be said for the large hadron collider (LHC), a 27-kilometer circle on the border between France and Switzerland. When it begins operation in 2007, it will pack the colossal wallop of 14 trillion electron volts. A trillion electron volts, it turns out, is about the same amount of energy used by a mosquito to fly. The remarkable thing about the LHC is that it will concentrate its energy beam into a space one-trillionth the size of a mosquito, smashing protons into 10,000 pieces or more.
According to physicist Michio Kaku, the LHC’s incredible focusing power will create “an entire zoo of subatomic particles not seen since the Big Bang,” including mini black holes. Mini black holes? Intellectually scintillating though such a smash-up may be, questions must be raised about the calamity potential for some of these experiments. Don’t black holes, mini and otherwise, have a tendency to suck up everything around them into oblivion?
Martin Rees, a colleague of Hawking’s at the University of Cambridge, is a physicist who also has the distinction of serving as the United Kingdom’s Royal Astronomer. Rees warns that the shower of quarks resulting from proton-antiproton collisions could create mini black holes, called strangelets, which have the capability of contagiously converting everything they encounter into a new, hyperdense form of matter. Atoms are made mostly of empty space, space that would be squeezed out by the strangelet, compressing the Earth into an inert sphere about the size of a Home Depot.
An inglorious ending, that.
GRAY GOO
There’s always a risk of unanticipated outcomes with new inventions—for example, the “gray goo” scenario that they try not to talk much about, up the road at Los Alamos National Laboratory, famed as the atom bomb’s birthplace. Los Alamos is a leader in nanotechnology, which seeks to create nanoscale (billionth of a meter) machines designed to behave like the ribosomes in the cells of our body, assembling complex structures, such as proteins, out of simpler compounds, such as nitrogen, a key component. Nanotechnologists have discovered that, given the right circumstances, the atoms of certain elements naturally assemble themselves into complex structures; germanium atoms will, like cheerleaders at a football game, climb on top of each other to form a pyramid, defying the natural tendency of most atoms, and most noncheerleaders, to give in to gravity and remain on the ground. This self-assembly property proves quite convenient for all sorts of nanoscale endeavors, from breeding ultrapowerful computer chips from bacteria to creating infinitesimal machines that can be injected into the bloodstream to eat up cancers or infections.
What if the nanomachines’ appetites got out of control? The result would be gray goo, a term coined by nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler, in Engines of Creation. Gray goo is a hypothetical nanosubstance that keeps on reproducing itself until it devours all the carbon, hydrogen, and whatever other elements it lusts for and has gooed over the face of the Earth. Imagine the parts of a box of Tinkertoys, carefully laid out on the right kind of mat, assembling themselves into, say, a Tinkertoy robot. Kind of cool. But now imagine that process going haywire, Tinkertoy Robot #1 making Tinkertoy Robot #2, and then those two making two more, and then those four making four more, with the numbers doubling into the thousands, millions, billions, in a runaway process that would continue until the world’s raw materials were consumed.
According to Drexler, rapidly self-replicating nanomachines could outweigh the
