No-one noticed the end of the world yesterday.
Earthly creatures skipped an atomic heartbeat in vague unease then, as if startled from a dream, resumed in tedium their virtual toils.
At 9.28am GMT on September 10, 2008 in a former reality, deflected 27Km circular by the most powerful of supercooled magnets, two streams of protesting protons tore at the fabric.
An oscilloscopic double-trace brought unalloyed exultation to the virtual faces of dozens of science doyens pressed into a suddenly evanescent control centre.
Euphoria spread like wavefronts, echoing elation to the ghost-like countenances of thousands of former beings on a recently-existent globe, centre of a distorting plane eight minutes hence from an unconcerned star named Sol.
On formerly material Earth, scientific intelligentsia had piffled suggestions that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider risked human existence, as they did might the first atomic detonation ignite planetary atmosphere, or strangelets might transmute this earthly realm into another.
This eminent consensus ultimately rested on indisputable proofs – supplied by a working universe – that such events go on endlessly without cataclysm on and within Earth, the moon, the sun, red giants, white dwarfs… and of course, in, on and around relatively static and indisputably real and rather larger black holes.
Other, however, than on Earth would unlikely be found teams of human engineers, directed by postulating boffins, misdirecting the forces of nature – as they had ever since opposing thumbs dammed rivers, burned forests, combusted fossil fuels, or harnessed horses, if not nuclei.
Nowhere else in the universe had bridges, dams and burning World Trade Centres collapsed, or cryogenic inner-triplet focusing-quadrupole magnet supports broken during pressure testing in oversight of “very simple balance of forces” despite four engineering reviews.
Not to mention, so I do, had (from engineering oversight) planes, trains, cranes or cars collided or crashed on a scale elsewhere unseen, except upon this arrogant little planet.
Nature’s impersonal perverseness might smite civilizations or cruelly terminate lineages of creatures, yet only humans could both ensure and accelerate such chaos.
Nature supplied the raw ingredients for dynamite, yet man brought these together to blow himself up. Nature danced more protons within the smallest sun than humankind could ever imagine – yet only this insolent ape chose to concentrate them in pipes to leap in glee at the collisions.
A mostly hairless ape that chose to spend 6 billion Euros over 2 decades on a project to selfishly preoccupy the most valuable intellects on Earth while nations cried in misery and the planet wilted from environmental assault.
It chose to ignore trillions of dollars thrown at Middle East wars to nowhere.
It plundered neighbors and their lands while breeding a human plague. A staggering blind stupidity from which it shall never recover.
Whether it was September 10, 2008, or some future time that we chanced in flukish fumbling a billionth-billionth possibility and managed to demolish the planet – or dully, slowly cook it – I will never know.
Dreams fade in memories volatile and something went wrong for I can see through my hand, that’s all I know.