A Laser to end all other Lasers.

"I am going to blow up the Earth with my Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator"

Marvin the Martian would be proud, I think. His "Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator" never quite got off the ground the way we would have liked to see. Blowing up the Earth for an unobstructed view of Venus was just a task to great for the little guy. Luckily, the Europeans are taking his concept to an entirely new level and have announced plans to create a laser beam so powerful, they believe it is capable of tearing a hole in Space-time itself, revealing the matter and antimatter underneath. It is thought that the laser will help in understanding the nature of dark matter, the "missing" mass that is thought to pervade the entire observable Universe.

That seems like a noble enough. Build a laser and discover how the Universe works. Let's take a closer look at what this baby is capable of.

At peak power, the fourth laser in Europe's Extreme Light Infrastructure project (or ELI) will combine ten beams into a single pulse measuring 200 petawatts. 200 petawatts is significantly more power that our entire race generates at any given moment, and in fact more total power than Earth receives from the sun.

The 200 petawatt pulses will only last 1.5 x 10^-14 second, which is about the same amount of time that it takes for light to travel from one side of a human hair to the other, if you shave the hair down by 90%.

That's quite a laser! I wonder what their monthly electric bill is going to look like. Let's not forget that European economy is collapsing before our eyes. Have a look at the 3 facilities being used to achieve this. We're talking budgets of hundreds and hundred of millions of Euros.

Forgetting the financial side of it all, I am left with one question. What happens if we really do tear a hole in space-time? Will it quickly patch itself back up, or will the tear spread, swallowing our planet and every other bit of mass in our Universe? I feel very much like one of the the handful of Manhattan Project scientists that worried that the detonation of the A-Bomb could have caused the atmosphere to ignite. Granted, these scientists were proven wrong, but their concerns were valid at that time. If the Atmosphere did ignite, there would be no one left to say "I told you so," so I guess it wasn't a concern - just as it isn't now.

Does answering the questions of the Universe benefit mankind enough to offset the risks inherent in creating (and actually using) such a device?