Your IHT version also edits more ruthlessly than the NYT version, which includes Stephen Hawking's opinion that any man-made black holes "would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat". Cool picture, though.

More people should read the philosopher John Leslie's book The End of the World, on the Doomsday argument. It's fun, if you're not too attached to the continued existence of humans.

Do they realise that Switzerland is a different country?

http://www.exitmundi.nl/blackhole.htm

Or maybe France.

http://www.unificationtheory.com/astrophysics/starandgalaxy.htm

The other litigant, Walter Wagner, filed a similar suit against another collider that was found to be baseless.

Any quantum black holes that form should be evaporated almost instantly by Hawking radiation. Even in the unlikely event that a theoretically-possible quantum strangelet forms, it's extremely unlikely that it would lead to all nearby matter being converted to strangelets.

I'm not one to try to slap the beaker out of anyone's hand, especially when their IQ is twice mine, but am I really supposed to trust these scientists? I mean, I KNOW there has never been any situation where the discoveries of a group of highly educated scientists have led to the deaths of large numbers of people, but it's possible, right?

The concerns you cite were made before the explosion of the first plutonium fission bomb in 1945; which is a very different beast from an H (for Hydrogen) fusion-bomb.

By the time we got around to testing those much more powerful weapons, nobody was in the least concerned about what they might do to the atmosphere.

$8 billion is chicken feed. 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day. Distribute that evenly and they get less than $2.

Yet he thinks we are making nanobots! It's enough to give the people work here stitches in laughter, it's a persistant nuisance to our advisors.

It reminds of the scene in the Simpsons, where they are in itchy and scratchy land and one of the robots removes his face plate to expose his circuitry, to which Marge resonds, "You see all that stuff inside Homwer? That's why your robot never worked."