Why take the chance?

Question

Those physicists in their labs smashing subatomic particles together are starting to tick me off.

Maybe it's a one in a googol chance that they'll create a black hole that will suck up the solar system or open a wormhole to the center of a star and blow everything up but that's still too high. We only have one Earth, why take the chance?

You can call me paranoid but i am seriously concerned that they're messing with forces that they hardly understand, trying simply to get the biggest bang.

I know that any adverse consequences from particle acceleration and the like are very, very, very low but why risk it? What do the expect to find out that would make it worth smashing hadrons?

Answer 1

You don't have a yearning to know how everything happened...what gave us this home? Not only are the chances of a black hole slim, It wouldn't be able to contain itself and collapse, leaving everything virtually unharmed...

Answer 2

Your odds of dying in a car accident in the next year are about 1 in 6000, and yet you'd still get into a car.  Life is a series of managed risks.    The risk to reward ratio for the particle accelerators is quite low.

Follow-Up Response:  How can you say that there is any risk to the planet or solar system?  There is no evidence to support that claim.  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) is a collection of scientists that have studied the risks and concluded that the LHC particle presents no danger.

However, there are significant questions that may be answered.  The LHC may help scientists verify theoretical concepts that could lead to a Grand Unified Theory, or verify the existence of the Higgs boson which has only been theorized to exist.