Those of you who read science things or have had the unfortunate experience of seeing the second Dan Brown/Tom Hanks flick Angels and Demons are probably familiar with the Hadron Collider. Located outside of Geneva, it’s a $9 billion, 17 mile racetrack like structure that shoots a bunch of beams of protons back and forth to make particles collide in order to recreate forces and particles that happened during the Big Bang.

It’s purpose is to help sceintist understand the elements of nature better and has been described as a “Time machine to look back to the earliest moments of creation and to be able to explain the present state of the universe and to predict its fate.”

Today, it was announced that the contraption had succeeded in making the beams collide, producing a  “candidate collision events.”

Pretty cool, huh? But wait a second…the collider also has the potential to create black holes and some smart people think that this is a bad idea, since we really have never been close enough to a black hole to know its effects.  It could, in the worst case scenario, swallow the earth like a fat man takes down a twinkie.

From NatGeo:

There’s also a very, very remote chance that the process will spawn black holes—any one of which could assume an odd orbit within Earth, devouring microscopic chunks of matter until the entire planet is gone, physicists say.”

Sleep tight earth.