Yeah, I was waiting for someone to say that. But most other people go on to mention that there's a nonzero chance that someone zapping a burrito in a microwave will also destroy the planet. I just heard Michio Kaku the other day on the radio claiming that he has his graduate students calculate the probability that all their atoms will spontaneously tunnel through a brick wall and harmlessly reassemble on the other side.

These are seriously misleading analogies.

For one, the destructive effects of microwave ovens and probabilities of quantum tunneling through brick walls are frequentist, statistical examples, whereas when considering the LHC, we are considering the Bayesian prior probabilities that certain physical parameters will come to be recognized as Nature's true choices--assuming civilization lasts long enough. Conflating the two is an obfuscation--not an argument.

In the one example, we are told that there is a nonzero probability that just about any action whatever, like turning on a microwave oven, could cause a weird quantum chain of events that could destroy everything. In other words, someone could turn on a microwave 10¹⁰⁰⁰ times, but on the 10¹⁰⁰⁰ + 1 time, the microwave tunnels into a dangerous black hole that destroys the world; so the probability that a microwave will destroy the world is 10^-1000 (or whatever), which is technically nonzero, we are told, and that the LHC is like the microwave--thus we are led blindfolded by the nose and invited to believe the conclusion that there is no more physical theory behind the idea that the LHC could destroy the world than weird quantum tunneling events that apply equally to microwave ovens.

Few arguments are further from the truth.

The question is whether machines like the LHC wherever and whenever in the universe they are built will produce world-destroying miniblack holes every single time they are turned on. And so discussions of what is the magnitude of the Bayesian prior probability that the LHC will destroy the world (p[sub]catastrophe[/i]) is an attempt to decide on the liklihood that the frequentist probability that the LHC will destroy the world is either 1 or 0.

And the physical argument that the LHC will destroy the world doesn't depend on weird quantum tunneling. It depends rather on whether Hawking radiation exists (it's never been observed), whether we exist in 5 to 7 dimensions, and whether neutron stars are superfluid.

In this regard, I should note the fact that we humans in our early state of technological development are apparently the only technological species in the galaxy, when the law of large numbers and evolution suggest that the galaxy should be teeming with technological life. The standard explanation for the so-called Great Silence is that other species that came before us destroyed themselves through technological hubris.