Alien Jesus Collective

A couple of scientists are suing for a time out on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider project, current slated to come online this summer. The LHC is arguably the world’s most advanced particle accelerator (or “atom smasher”). According to the NY Times article:

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Phillip Plait (of BadAstronomy.com fame) has a concise and rational response to the concerns about LHC. I tend to agree with his assessment. If you’re going to panic about world destroying science, panic about genetically modified crops.