Am I misunderstanding, missing a joke, or did the overwhelming majority here consider the probability that the LHC could destroy the world non-negligible? After reading this article, I wound up looking up articles on collider safety just to make sure I wasn't crazy. My understanding of physics told me that all the talk of LHC-related doomsday scenarios was just some sort of science fiction meme. I was under the impression that artificial black holes would take levels of energy comparable to the big bang, and a micro black hole would be pretty low risk even then. (Reading the wikipedia article further, I see that FHI was involved in the raising of concerns over the LHC, which is the closest thing to an explanation for this discussion I've found so far.)

I'm actually kinda concerned about this, since if the discussion on this page is taking LHC risk seriously, then either I or LW had serious problems modeling reality. This wouldn't be in the category of "weird local culture"; cryonics involves a lot of unknowns and most LWers notice this, and UFAI actually makes much more sense as existential risk, since an unfriendly transhuman intelligence would actually be dangerous... but there were plenty of knowns that could be used to predict the LHC's risk, and they all pointed toward the risk being infinitecimal.

If, on the other hand, this was some bit of humor playing on pop-sci memes, used to play with the anthropic principal and quantum suicide, then oops.