Supercollider, Black Holes, Einstein, World's End

The "LHC" is the most expensive and powerful scientific experiment ever at $10 Billion and counting. It is a particle smasher that accelerates protons to 99.999999% of the speed of light and crashes them together like figure 8 car racing if you remember that. The experiments are underway now at half power, and will be cranked up to full power over the next several months.

"Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer many of the most fundamental questions in physics, questions concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, especially regarding the intersection of quantum mechanics and general relativity, where current theories and knowledge are unclear or break down altogether." (Wikipedia)

There are concerns, notwithstanding assurances from stakeholder scientists, that the LHC might generate doomsday phenomena by creating stable microscopic black holes or by the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets that could eat the earth. While participating scientists project that small mini black holes will in fact be created, they predict that they will quickly "evaporate".

"If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein

Some speculation has been done on what will occur if a stable black hole is created and absorbs the earth. It would start with earthquakes that become progressively worse as the Earth implodes. The process would take some time (months, years?) and we would be aware that it was happening. At some point of course, we would get drowned or squished to death by rocks and dirt before getting to the black hole's event horizon ... the shell from which nothing escapes. We would never have the luxury of seeing the black hole itself.

Strangelets are a different matter:

"If the strange matter hypothesis is correct and a strangelet comes in contact with a lump of ordinary matter such as Earth, it could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter. This "ice-nine" disaster scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter." (Wikipedia)

The potential catastrophic results from the Large Hadron Supercollider are not without precedent. Similar speculations about destroying the earth were made before the first detonation of an atomic bomb in the 1940s. That experiment "worked out" and LHC is a mere upgrade.

Pascal's Wager is used in arguments regarding belief in God ,,. In short: if you believe in God and he exists you win, but if you believe in God and he doesn't exist, you have lost nothing. Similarly, the scientists who predict that the supercollider is safe may, on the one hand, win by unlocking the riddles of the universe, resolving relativity and quantum theories. On the other hand, if the earth disappears into a black hole, they will be beyond reproach and certainly won't get sued. Genetic experimentation which is proceeding at breakneck speeds is another example of Pascal's Wager. If a geneticist wins the Nobel Prize for experimental work, he is a winner, and if one of his superbugs escapes the lab and wipes out life on the planet, he is equally judgment proof.

There is a debate about whether any information exists inside of, or can escape from a black hole. This is famously the "black hole information paradox" Ultimately of course, across the cosmic timescale it doesn't matter, but your personal question might be "Will there be anything left of me if I get eaten by a black hole or will everything I ever was get compressed into a singularity where everything is the same?"

Personally, I take the question seriously. Decades ago I had what I would best describe as a religious experience where I saw (experienced) a unity to the universe and I'm happy to report that while your form may change ... "you" are immortal in the sense that you are part of a much larger consciousness that pervades the universe. The odd black hole here and there won't change that.

“The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion” - Albert Einstein