Damn it! This is a dangerous, existential risk and I'm pretty pissed off at the hubris of those involved!
"Deep underground on the Franco-Swiss border, someone will throw a switch next year to start one of the most ambitious experiments in history, probing the secrets of the universe and possibly finding new dimensions.
The Large Hadron Collider — a 17-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) circular particle accelerator — at the CERN experimental facility near Geneva will smash protons into each other at unimaginable speeds, trying to replicate in miniature the events of the Big Bang.
'These beams will have the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier slammed into the size of a zero on a 20-pence piece,' Brian Cox of Manchester University told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
'We are going to make mini-Big Bangs. There has never been such a jump in particle physics. It will go into an area that we don't really understand,' he added."
I highlighted that last sentence, because it completely negates what he says at the end of the article.
Cox dismissed worries that by adventuring into the unknown and creating tiny black holes, the machine could even threaten to destroy the planet.
"The probability is at the level of 10 to the minus 40," he said.
That is a load of crap. It's impossible to make accurate predictions about processes which you admit you don't understand. Even if you were right about the probability, it is not zero. You are betting everything humanity ever was, is or could someday be on a roll of the dice. It's just wrong.
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