September 11th, 2008
Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?
Nope. That’s the answer you’ll get from hasthe
The doomsday site was created by Mike Kania (right), a 28 year old web developer who works for Six Apart in Philadelphia. I tracked him down from a comment he left in the source code and asked him a few questions.
[Ed] Where’d you get the idea for the site?
[Mike] The idea for the website came to me.. well, I don’t really know where it came from. I know of a bunch of other similar “single serving sites” that perform similarly useless functions (isitchristmas.com, barackobamaisyournewbicycle.
[Ed] How long you think we’ll have, when the end comes?
[Mike] I figure if the Large Hadron Collider does defy everyone’s expectations & black hole-ifies us all, it’d probably happen pretty quick. I don’t think I’d necessarily have much time to think about much besides maybe “Hey, what’s th-
[Ed] Do you think they would tell us?
[Mike] Would they NEED to tell us? One would expect the world’s end to be relatively noticeable. Then again, I suppose people aren’t particularly observant, so who knows.
[Ed] So how does the site detect the end of the world?
[Mike] If you look at the source, you’ll note that it’s using the little-known JavaScript “worldHasEnded” variable to determine whether or not we’ve all been vaporized. [The site's message will change to "Yup." when that happens.] I’m sure glad the guys at Netscape bothered to put that in there way back when.
[Ed] Are you sure it will work?
[Mike] I’ve done some pretty extensive QA on the site but was unable to duplicate the exact conditions under which the Earth is destroyed. I did think I was pretty close at one point, but it turned out I was just kinda drunk.
[Ed] Do you know who did the site at hasthe
[Mike] Yup, we exchanged a few emails actually — his name is Daniel Drucker. Unfortunately (and weirdly), he’s also in Philadelphia, so the websites aren’t going to do a great job of providing independent verification of the world’s existence — if he’s gone, I’m probably toast too.
[Ed] If the world was ending how would you spend your last few minutes?
[Mike] Probably lamenting the things I didn’t do, like have a second helping of pie [or another milkshake] — who needs to worry about looks when the world’s ending?
[Ed] Are you really worried the LHC will destroy the world?
[Mike] Nah, I think we’re pretty safe. Then again, nothing’s actually been collided yet (I believe they only fired it up so far with a single beam), so check back with me in October… if we’re still around.
Related articles:
- Large Hadron Collider doesn’t cause the end of the world - yet
- Large Hadron Collider “Actually Worked”
- Why the Large Hadron Collider must be stopped
- First Beam For Large Hadron Collider, World’s Mightiest Particle Accelerator
- LHC, Genomics and the era of massive data sets
- The Collider and the Grid: Distributed computing made LHC possible
- LHC a sure sign that Europe is the center of physics
Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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| 09/11/08
