There were about a thousand people up there. There was a bonfire, and a lot of people with candles, and the smell of incense, and some people setting off bottle rockets. There was a lot of singing, people with guitars and such. A lot of laughter. We circulated, and I didn’t find anybody who was taking the whole thing seriously. I’m sure there were a few of them there, but I didn’t see them. Most people had driven up the mountain to have a good time and smoke some good grass. Before long, even the people who might have been a little worried before weren’t worried about anything. A good, stony time was had by all. I shot a little 8mm film. Wish I knew what happened to it.

There have been countless end-of-the-world predictions since then, but never a party like that, or at least not one that I attended. There was some preacher who set the date at least six times. Can’t recall his name. Every time one of his prophesies fizzled he said he’d misread the stars, or something, and it never seem to faze his disciples one bit. I recall a story about three women in Michigan who stripped themselves naked, covered themselves with mustard, and stole a postal van. When stopped, they said it had something to do with the end of the world, which was happening that day. I’ve always wondered what they were smoking, and if I could have some.

You’ll remember the last big end of the world, set to happen on December 31, or January 1, at midnight, the infamous Y2K. Well, maybe not the end of the world, but the end of the Internet, telephones, computers, the electrical grid, and television, which in this day and age would probably be worse than actual Armageddon. What we got instead, a year later, (and no seer predicted this) was a planetary disaster named George W. Bush, who was worse than Y2K, Icarus, and Armageddon combined.

Well, my friends, the end of the world is upon us again, and this time I have every reason to believe that the predictions will come true. That’s because, this time, it’s scientists who are about to set it in motion, and these guys know what they’re doing.

Sometime today (it may already have happened when you read this) scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), underground in France and Switzerland at the facilities of the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) will crank up the world’s largest and most expensive scientific instrument and start bunches of lead nuclei speeding around a 17-mile super-cooled racetrack at almost the speed of light. There’s no need to be alarmed as yet; this will only be a test run, the heavy particles (lead has an atomic weight of 207!) will be going in only one direction. Later on they’ll try it out in the other direction. But then, somewhere near the end of this month, they’ll do what the super-smasher was designed to do, which is, you’ll not be surprised to hear … smash!! That’s how you learn stuff about the things that are inside an atom and don’t really want to come out. You smash them suckers together, head-on, and bust them apart so all those odd little quarks, fermions, bosons, baryons, hadrons, and whatchamons explode outwards like a rack of pool balls in the break.

Here’s a good explanation of it all: The Large Hadron Rap

What they’re looking for is the Higgs boson, which, I gather, is the last particle predicted by the Standard Model that has yet to be created and observed in the laboratory. Ah, but there’s all sorts of stuff they might find as well, and some of it is a lot weirder than a Higgs. A few of these are miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions.

A strangelet is a hypothetical object consisting of a bound state of roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks. It could be real tiny, or maybe even a few meters across, in which case it is called a quark star. A quark star is what happens when you squeeze a neutron star and it stops short of being a black hole. Some say the quark matter in the center of a quark star is actually the elusive “dark matter” that’s supposed to make up at least five times more of the universe than the part we can see.

Got it? Onward.

We all know what black holes are. There is said to be one in the center of Dick Cheney’s brain. A black hole has gravity so strong that not even light can escape. It can be as big as a star (astronomers think all galaxies have monster black holes in the middle), or smaller than an atomic nucleus (in theory, no one has detected a small one). Ah, but if the LHC creates a small black hole … it could gradually eat up the Earth! (Or not. Hawking theory says these little critters would evaporate in nanoseconds.)

Still with me?

De Sitter space “is the Lorentzian analog of an n-sphere (with its canonical Riemannian metric). It is a maximally symmetric, Lorentzian manifold with constant positive curvature, and is simply-connected for n at least 3.” So sez Wiki.

Clear? Me, neither. But I’ve never let that stop me before! I’m a science fiction writer, and highfalutin’ bullshit is my trade …

Hearing of this potential catastrophe, I reacted a bit like I did that long-ago day in 1968; that is to say, I sort of welcomed it. Forty years has added a great deal of cynicism to my outlook on life, and the last eight years makes me despair of humanity in general and my country in particular. I mean, we didn’t really elect them in 2000, they stole it, but we did vote to return them to office in 2004, and it’s looking at least possible that we’re going to elect them yet again … only possibly worse. My enthusiasm for living in a country governed by George W. McCain and the Moosekiller is, shall we say, minimal. My desire to experience more things like 9/11, Rwanda, Kosovo, the Iraq War, the Taliban, Pentecostals (the Slayer of Moose is one; she believes God is, literally, on our side in war), the killing fields of Cambodia, gangsta rap music, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on the Bill of Rights, Homeland Security, Jim Jones and many other atrocities is … less than zero.

End of the world? In the words of an awful, awful man, “Bring it on!” Just show me a place where I can sit and watch the last act.

But there is another possibility.

Superstring theory and some of the weirder speculations of quantum physics claims that there are more dimensions than the three (four, including time) that we experience. Some say ten, some say eleven … but hey, what’s a dimension or two among friends? Those other six (or seven) are folded very, very, very small. So small that some say there is no conceivable experiment that could reveal them to us, even if we were equipped to perceive them.

But out there in that tenth (or eleventh) dimension is the possibility that there are not only a lot more universes than this one, but that there are, in fact, an infinite number of universes. Not only that, but they’re not far away. They could be as close as pages in a closed book. An infinite number of universes implies that not only does every possible universe exist, somewhere, but every impossible universe exists. If we could only find a way to get to them …

Well, there are those who think that, along with destroying this universe—and as I’ve already said, good riddance—the LHC might open the door to those other universes. In the act of our destruction, we might open ourselves to infinite possibilities.

So here’s what I propose.

All you folks at CERN, hang onto your freakin’ hadrons for a while, okay? Not a long time. Just don’t start smashing them together at the end of September. Wait until Wednesday, November 4. By that morning we will know if the American people have once again swallowed the Republican line of bullshit and been persuaded and intimidated into voting against their own interests. If George W. McCain and Chatty Kathy emerge victorious on that day … well, crank up that motherfucker and start crashing! The LHC accelerates groups of 100 billion lead nuclei and will produce six hundred million collisions per second! Maybe one of those will propel us all into a land where political lies are exposed, where voters actually learn something about a candidate beyond the brightness of her smile … where George W. Bush and his hideous administration never existed!!!!!

September 10, 2008

Hollywood, California