Large Hadron Collider – apocalypse unlikely

So concerned are some that the high-energy experiments at the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world that a lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii to prevent the LHC from cranking up later this year. Seems rather pointless – much as I’d quite like to live out my natural time here on Earth, if the LHC truly is an existential threat then death will be exceedingly fast, painless and we’ll be none the wiser anyway. As far as I’m concerned, go for it eggheads! As George Dvorsky points out we’ve been here before, with the Manhattan Project, and we’ll be here again, with nanotechnology and hard AI, let alone whatever we’ve yet to think up.

Dvorsky does mention an article in Nature by Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom in 2005, ‘Astrophysics: Is a doomsday catastrophe likely?‘ The authors concluded that every billion years a civilisation destroys itself in a particle physics experiment and that we Earthlings could do the same, although the likelihood is somewhat slim:

The risk of a doomsday scenario in which high-energy physics experiments trigger the destruction of the Earth has been estimated to be minuscule. But this may give a false sense of security: the fact that the Earth has survived for so long does not necessarily mean that such disasters are unlikely, because observers are, by definition, in places that have avoided destruction. Here we derive a new upper bound of one per billion years (99.9% confidence level) for the exogenous terminal-catastrophe rate that is free of such selection bias, using calculations based on the relatively late formation time of Earth.

The probability distribution is shown for observed planet-formation times, assuming catastrophe timescales, τ, of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Gyr and infinity (shaded yellow), respectively (from left to right). The probability of observing a formation time ≥9.1 Gyr for Earth (area to the right of the dotted line) drops below 0.001 for τ<1.1 Gyr.