From New York Times Science:The new particle collider in Europe hasn’t hurt anyone there yet, but all the talk about a “doomsday machine” seems to be taking a toll elsewhere, according to Reuters (hat tip: Charles Mann). It reports from Bhopal that Indians were so alarmed by reports that the Large Hadron Collider could destroy the world that they flocked to temples to pray and fast. One teenage girl traumatized by the warnings on television committed suicide, according to Reuters, which quoted her father: “We tried to divert her attention and told her she should not worry about such things, but to no avail.”
My colleague Dennis Overbye has done a good job of debunking this week’s fears, and Ron Bailey of Reason Magazine has done a nice analysis of the odds.
For further reassurance, I recommend an analysis by Max Tegmark of M.I.T. and Nick Bostrom of Oxford University. (Dr. Bostrom was featured in my column last year about the possibility that we’re living in a computer simulation.) Dr. Tegmark and Dr. Bostrom estimate, based on the relatively late evolution of life on Earth and on what we observe in the rest of the universe, that the annual risk of our planet’s being annihilated by high-energy particle collisions (or, for that matter, by an asteroid or by extraterrestrials) is one in a trillion.
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