Watching the news brings home that there are plenty of ways that we could go to meet our maker before our time ranging from catching Ebola to be mistaken for an unarmed black person by an American policeman. There is also North Korea, Nuclear War, Artificial Intelligence rising up, stray Asteroids, Al Queada, fracking poisoning us all, drugs, Vladimar Putin, Assad, ISIS or climate change so just to make sure we don't get to chime in the 22nd Century, they have only gone and upgraded the Large Hadron Collider.
The piece of machinery that can already create black holes is due to be restarted after scientists doubled it's power so they can now smash particles into each other at just a hair less than the speed of light, a speed unprecedented in human history.
'These collisions produce a cascade of subatomic particles and radiation that provide clues about the building blocks of matter' said one scientist at CERN, adding excitedly: 'Some of these particles are new and are not usually seen outside of such collisions. The more energy in the collisions, the greater chance that something interesting will show up'.
As my scientific background consists of writing my initials in bacteria in a petri dish and burning the sleeve of my blazer on a Bunsen Burner at school, i may not be best qualified to pass comments on things of a scientific nature but won't a collision of particles that made a black hole, if smashed into each other at twice the speed, just make a twice as large black hole?
It's one thing discovering the Higgs Bosun but not much use if we are disappearing over the Event Horizon and sucked into oblivion a fraction of a second later.
Where are the Terminator types coming back in time to stop us making such a catastrophic error because if ever a leather clad man wielding a shotgun on a motorbike saying 'Hasta la vista, baby' whilst riding around Switzerland is required, it's now.
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