Right, but if that were possible, it would have already happened. Cosmic rays hitting the Earth's upper atmosphere can already have much, much more energy than

Right, but if that were possible, it would have already happened. Cosmic rays hitting the Earth's upper atmosphere can already have much, much more energy than the LHC achieves. So the LHC is being ramped up to produce 13 TeV collisions... but we've measured cosmic ray impacts as high as 300,000,000 TeV. That was the so-called "oh my god particle", which had as much kinetic energy as a 60mph baseball, even though it was probably just a single proton. Sure, it's an outlier, but you can look at the overall distribution of cosmic ray flux: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#/media/File:Cosmic_ray_flux_versus_particle_energy.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#/media/File:Cosmic_r... Let's move beyond "seems plausible" and try to work with "supported by the data".