We Are Not Fish. I Am Sad.

Well, they turned on the big physics machine called the Large Hadron
Collider today. Some people thought there was a possibility of the
device doing something odd, most likely creating a black hole capable of
eating either France (if Hawking Radiation exists) or Earth (if not).
There was also an outside chance of something super-cool called a
"Critical Existence Failure" which basically means the Universe throws a
BSOD.

The problem comes from the fact that scientists often suck at PR. You
see, according to quantum theory, you can't actually rule out the above
possibilities. ANY GIVEN SECOND, there is a non-zero, but really, really
low chance that we all turn into fish, for instance. This is the
probability level of the LHC making a black hole that eats us all. It's
really, really low. I mean REALLY low, not win-the-lottery low, but
accidentally-walking-through-walls-instead-of-into-them low.

I can live with that.

Really, I could live with everyone dying from black hole annihilation
too. You see, according to most theory, there's actually time
compression as we collapse into the black hole, so while the folks on
Arcturus or what not can watch it happen in realtime and upload it to
the Universal Darwin Awards, from where we're standing, it feels like it
takes ten million years for the world to collapse in on itself. I
presume throughout that time, we'd just live our lives normally, but it
would really suck to get to that end point.