The Doomsday Machine

Feeling far too well-informed and thoughtful, I decided to kill a few brain cells on the FoxNews website (JP ducks after deliberately provoking Dave). I couldn't pass up the line, "Doomsday Machine Might Destroy World." (Here's the link) I know that FoxNews has a flair for excessive hyperbole, but I was far too intrigued to pass that up. As I suspected, the "Doomsday Machine" in question is the much ballyhooed Large Hadron Collider, a high-energy particle accellerator that looks like it could power the starship Enterprise.
But what does the Large Hadron Collider do? This is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:
It is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the last unobserved particle among those predicted by the Standard Model. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would shed light on the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking, through which the particles of the Standard Model are thought to acquire their mass.
Exactly!! What could be clearer than that!?

As you may have heard, some people are concerned about the minute possibility of the Hadron Collider inadvertently creating an artificial black hole. According to FoxNews and the babbling hobo that verified the information, miniature black holes could be created by the machine. According to three scientists who are actually intelligent enough to understand how the damn thing works,
"We conclude that ... the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible. Nonetheless, it remains true that the expected decay times are much longer (and possibly >> 1 second) than is typically predicted by other models."
As seemingly reassuring as this statement might sound, leave it to FoxNews to bring on the fear. The reporter, and I use the term loosely simply to agitate Dave, had to add this at the end of the article:
"FoxNews.com can think of a few other things that didn't seem possible once — the theory of continental drift, the fact that rocks fall from the sky, the notion that the Earth revolves around the sun, the idea that scientists could be horribly wrong. We're also wondering how often the LHC might create individual black holes, since longer-lived ones have a greater chance of merging with each other, and, um, well, see ya."
Is it too much to ask that I be allowed to go to bed at night without the existential fear of being sucked into another dimension by a minature black hole? I imagine that this Large Hadron Collider isn't exactly easy to understand. I'm sure you have to have the combined I.Q. of Doc Brown, Stephen Hawking, the old man from Fringe, and Scotty from Star Trek just to turn the damn thing on. How does the argument "Well, scientists have been wrong before!" possibly stand up to the reassurances of three world-renowned physicists who could probably melt metal with their minds?

Besides, FoxNews is being such a downer in this case. FoxNews is in the business of predicting worldwide armageddon (Hell, most Christians are looking forward to it), and compared to their usual harbingers of global destruction (democrats, universal health care, gay marriage, abortion, and just plain old wacky hippies), I think "black hole sucks us all into oblivion" has a certain flair that their other panic-inducing stories have been lacking. If I could choose a way for the world to end, black hole is up near the top of the list (right behind "Klingons arrive in orbit to enslave us all but not before proving that Star Trek is real). Think about the benefits of a black-hole-induced armageddon. Not only are you killed in less than a millisecond, but the entire world is vaporized leaving no evidence of our brilliantly stupid world wide suicide.

FoxNews is always saying that our world is becoming a moral vacuum. We might as well become a literal one.

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FoxNews.com: Existing solely so that JP can push Dave's buttons by mocking it mercilessly.