Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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Black Hole to Eat the Earth?
June 21st, 2008
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is going on on-line and will produce the most energetic man-made collisions ever created. There have been concerns that this will produce various doomsday scenarios, but as Dennis Overbye writes in the New York Times citing a recent safety report, the particle accelerator isn’t going to create a runaway black hole that could eat the Earth.
The proof is pretty trivial to high-energy particle physicists.
Cosmic rays from space already hit our atmosphere with far greater energies than the LHC can produce, and we study these air shower events with facilities like the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory. If collisions like the ones that will take place in the LHC produced black holes that had planet-eating capabilities, all the planets and stars would have been destroyed long ago.
Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss USA contest responded to the question “If you could live forever, would you and why?” with ‘I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.’
My version for the LHC threat: Collisions made by the LHC will not destroy us, because we should not be destroyed, because if we were supposed to be destroyed, we would have already been destroyed, but we haven’t been destroyed, which is why the collisions won’t destroy us.
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