Shine on, you crazy physics experiment...

It's official, the LHC beam works. And the world didn't end. Not that you'd expect it to--the various doomsday scenarios involving micro-black holes, strangelets or cosmological phase transitions don't come into play until they start colliding the beams. All they did today was verify that they can power the beam up to its injection energy of 450 GeV and steer it around the accelerator. It will be a few weeks before they generate collisions and it will probably be a year or more before they have ramped up to full energy.

While we wait for data (or the end of the world), one way to occupy ourselves is to consider what weight should be applied to those doomsday scenarios? They're not entirely without merit--mostly they're based on reasonable theoretical possibilities. But they've been considered, more than once, already. There was the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider review, for one. CERN has published its own safety assessment of the LHC, specifically. At some point, one has to find the basic counter-argument reasonably persuasive: particle accelerators don't do anything that nature doesn't already do, and the universe, such as it is, survives just the same.

Of course the details are rather more complicated, if you want to do a thorough evaluation. Which you probably do when the unlikely scenario has potential consequences that involve eating planets. This lesson is often illustrated in Science Fiction literature--in particular I always think of Larry Niven's "The Hole Man" (Hugo winner for Best Short Story, 1975) when these ideas come up. Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, with it's Ice-Nine is apropos as well. But real life provides lots of examples of unlikely catastrophes that nonetheless happen. So there's clearly some value in reflecting carefully on poorly-understood risks. Here's an interesting discussion contrasting the RHIC report with LA-602, a Manhattan Project paper considering the possibility of runaway thermonuclear fusion in the atmosphere, ignited by a fission bomb.

Still, if you were really concerned about the possibility of the LHC destroying the world, would your response be to file a lawsuit complaining that the Environmental Impact Assessment hadn't been filed? I don't think that would be mine. Granted that I have never read the NEPA, but it doesn't seem likely that complying with its requirements in the first place would have resulted in anything but some paperwork. I would guess that an environmental impact assessment, had it considered the doomsday scenarios, would have concluded that expert opinion mostly suggests they are too implausible to be treated as significant impacts. So the relief being sought, namely an injunction preventing the operation of the LHC, doesn't seem justified. And that's without considering the obvious jurisdiction problems in applying a statute that deals with US Federal Government actions to a project that is under European direction. (Those are being argued, currently.)