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any micro black hole would be a side effect of LHC collisions, strangelets are a primary goal.

Interestingly, a major argument by CERN scientists concerning the safety of possibly creating strangelets is that strangelets have never been proven to exist - although trying to obtain such proof is part of the purpose of the facility. And even if the LHC were to produce strangelets, it is argued that they would quickly break down.

But this assumption is outside known science. The truth is that no one knows how stable or unstable new strangelets would be. Known particles which incorporate strange quarks, such as the lambda particle, are always unstable because the strange quark is heavier than the others, so the strangeness is quickly lost as the strange quark decays into up and down quarks. However, the strange matter hypothesis suggests that particles with a larger number of quarks, divided more or less equally among the various types, may not decay (due to the Pauli exclusion principle). Another unknown of strange matter is surface tension. If it turns out to be above a critical threshold, the bigger the strangelet, the more stable it will be ... and it just might have the ability to convert other forms of matter as well.

In total, the odds of anything really bad happening have been calculated to be approximately 50 million to one.

Do you play the lottery? Those are not ^15+ quantum odds or the necessary statistical 'out'. Those are significantly better than the real-life odds of winning most lottery jackpots - and yet we know that people do win, and win quite regularly.

But - no danger. Nothing bad could ever happen from those odds. So says the canon of physicists, most of whom also firmly hold to the theory of evolution ... which absolutely requires a long series of events at much smaller odds, individually and collectively, to result in - us. Most of these same physicists would rather believe in these short odds of blind evolution than even consider intelligent design. This, they consider rational.

At the same time, for some reason the same blind chance somehow does not apply where the LHC is concerned. The CERN physicists are perfectly willing to bet, not only their own lives, but the whole earth on it.

If that is not blind faith, I do not know what is.

"We recall the rates for the collisions of cosmic rays with the Earth, Sun, neutron stars, white dwarfs and other astronomical bodies at energies higher than the LHC. The stability of astronomical

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