my take on things - comments about all the world and his brother
Published on March 13, 2010 By utemia In Pure Technology

A german woman living in Zurich filed a suit with the german Supreme Court in Karlsruhe against the end of the world. The court denied hearing the case..
The lady in question wanted to commit Germany to actively do something about the CERN because the scientific experiments there threatened the destruction of the world (the Cern might create tiny black holes). Germany had the obligation to intervene at least until the warning of the impeding doom could be empirically confuted.

But the court found a legal response: It is not enough that the complainant announced potential events causing damage (the end of the world!) and tried to substantiate her claim by referring to the inherent dangers of the experiments which might occur (the end of the world) in her oppinion.
To accept such a lawsuit would set a precedence and would allow for strategies to sack any researchrequest by project specific warnings.

The court also missed a conclusive presentation of the complainant that the end of the world, which she feared, would surely come to pass (which is admittedly not an easy thing to do lol). The court concluded that it is not enough to base the warnings on a general suspicion of the laws of physics.
Even those who theorized that the end of the world might be possible only argued that their thought construct, which depended on many imponderable assumptions, had not yet been scientifically refuted.

Crazy.. that the courts had seriously been busy with that.


Comments
on Mar 13, 2010

reminds me of the time someone used the courts to try and sue God.  Seriously. 

on Mar 13, 2010

Falls into the same category.. but not exactly the same. There is a general question connected to this, namely how far nationstates have the obligation to protect their citicens from danger/harm that originates from an international organisation (like the CERN) and of which they are a member of. But the court avoided broaching that hot potatoe.

Principally, that woman does raise the legitimate general concern about unintended (harmful) consequences connected to technological progress. But the lawsuit just makes her look like a cray person.

on Mar 15, 2010

The mega mo-humper at Cern has even been accused of sabotaging itself from the future as well!  I do not know, but I am not worried too much.  I do not believe it will cause the end of the world in the first place, and as a physicist has stated, if it does, there will not be any time for anyone anywhere to go "oops"!

on Mar 15, 2010

OMG!  The CERN accellerator duplicated my post!

on Mar 15, 2010

Hope her lawyer wasn't on a contingency pay plan...hard to collect if her fears are founded and the world ends.