it wasn't just religious nuts - i was worried myself (i may be a nut, but i am certainly not religious!) - and most people dismissing the worries on the interne

it wasn't just religious nuts - i was worried myself (i may be a nut, but i am certainly not religious!) - and most people dismissing the worries on the internet were "science groupies" without a detailed understanding of the issues (in my experience, at the time, as far as i recall, etc). thankfully, there was a good report written that addressed the concerns in substantial detail. if you haven't read it, it's very interesting (and moderately reassuring) - http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/613175/files/CERN-2003-001.pdf?version=1 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/613175/files/CERN-2003-001.pdf?... [ps an example of how simple arguments are not necessarily right is that any black hole created by the lhc would be almost at rest in the frame of the collider, unlike expected products from astronomical processes; that means that it would be gravitationally bound, allowing the effects of a small cross-section to accumulate over time. this isn't advanced physics, by any stretch of the imagination, yet people never seem to address it. another issue is that planets may indeed be destroyed by cosmic processes - at the time the lhc was being designed we had very little in the way of statistics on the number of planets or their lifetimes, outside of our own solar system.]