The one point I have been trying to hammer on that none of you LHC boosters seem to grasp--although it is very simple--is the extreme value of the Earth.

Think first of the dollar value of everything you own, and everything you expect to earn in the future. Now integrate that over 8 billion humans. Now add the free ecosystem services that that nature gives us for free but are worth a lot of money. E.g., all that solar radiation and oxygen and stuff. Don't forget about the valuable recreational opportunities that nature also gives us. That's the present value of the Earth.

Now, you seem to think we're going to buy it anyway in a supernova GRB 100,000 years from now--and the human species has only been around for 100,000 years anyway, so let's just limit our concern for the future to 100,000 years. So multiply your the result of your first integration by 100,000--that's the total dollar value that's at risk

Now think of everything you value that would be totally sacrilegious to put a dollar value on: your kid, grandma, apple pie, freedom, the right to life, and the pursuit of happiness. Now somehow add that somehow to your dollar figure. You might want to add a value bonus to your many-segmented friends that only God and you can love--but are still valuable in themselves, I would say.

Now you have the total value of the Earth.

Now figure the probability that the world will be destroyed. The way you do that is to poll everybody on Earth who has an informed opinion on the matter what they think the probability is that the conclusion of the CERN safety report will turn out to be wrong. I did that exercise and thought that probability might be as high as 12%. The lawsuit against CERN says it could possibly be as high as 70%. Baron Rees said 1 out of 50,000,000. I saw someone else (an LHC booster) give a figure of 1 out of 300,000,000. Many others, like Fazor, say it's the same as a burrito in a microwave--i.e., essentially zero. But to be fair and democratic we would have to pool all the subjective probabilities (because they are all subjective, by definition).

Then take the median result of your poll. (You'd better take the median, because high values like mine will skew the results.) Now you have the probability that the world will be destroyed by the LHC--a value that should closely agree with what the British odds makers would come up with.

OK, now multiply the probability that the LHC will destroy the Earth times the total value of the Earth. The result is how much we should be willing to spend on preventing that risk. I guarantee you that the result will be much larger than the cost of a brand new, single beam collider that would not produce black holes that could get trapped by Earth's gravity.

Heck, if everyone on Earth chipped in 1 euro each to build CERN a brand new, 14 TeV, single beam collider, it would be the cheapest insurance that anyone ever bought.

That's why I won't get off my soapbox.