Apparently we’re still doing the “OMG what if it makes a black hole and kills us all???” dance around the Large Hadron Collider.  Enough people have taken these scary stories seriously that the LHC Safety Assessment Group has produced a fifteen-page report (PDF) telling them to get a life.

Even Scott Aaronson has broken his silence on the issue:

• Better safe than sorry (Shtetl-Optimized)

As a concerned citizen of Planet Earth, I demand that the LHC begin operations as soon as possible, at as high energies as possible, and continue operating until such time as it is proven completely safe to turn it off.

Given our present state of knowledge, we simply cannot exclude the possibility that aliens will visit the Earth next year, and, on finding that we have not yet produced a Higgs boson, find us laughably primitive and enslave us.  Or that a wormhole mouth or a chunk of antimatter will be discovered on a collision course with Earth, which can only be neutralized or deflected using new knowledge gleaned from the LHC.  Yes, admittedly, the probabilities of these events might be vanishingly small, but the fact remains that they have not been conclusively ruled out.

I fully endorse Dr. Aaronson’s position.