Earth Destroyers Targeted

Tomorrow the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland will finally fire up and attempt to recreate conditions that existed moments after the Big Bang. It's hoped that this, humanity's largest scientific experiment to date, will offer a glimpse through the murky fog of our universe's origins, revealing once-hidden truths about reality and allowing us to reach our primitive fingers into the void and brush the face of God. Or the world will be sucked into a black hole and we'll all die. While the first option is arguably preferable to the second (there are more than two, but I'm simplifying here), there are many who believe that switching on the LHC will more likely than not spell doom for our planet. And by "many", I mean "nuts". This has all been written about before, so I won't go into details again, but the gist of the situation is that some physicists believe the energy output of the LHC will spawn black holes or quantum strangelets that could suck us all up or transform us into pure energy. What these physicists don't understand (and the vast majority do) is that the same theory that would allow for the creation of a black hole under these conditions would also necessarily require that black hole to evaporate almost instantaneously. In other words, black holes aren't going to form, but even if they did, they'd be gone before they caused any harm. Regardless, the world's tinfoil hat wearers have fired up their word processors and uncorked their inkwells to send off death threats to the scientists working on the LHC. I guess this is understandable if you truly believe mad professors are going to destroy the world, but it's also a little futile. Here's hoping they stay firmly planted in their armchairs for the safety of these kindly scientists, but don't these death threateners sound like the laziest superheroes ever? More details here.