Once upon a time, humanity’s prevailing belief about the Earth’s geography was that the entire world was flat, and that sailing a ship beyond the borders of the known world meant “falling off” the world, encountering dragons, and an assortment of other painful, invariably lethal oddities.

We know the world is round now, because a few people started using reason instead of fear in their explorations of the world. The first people to suggest the world is round were imprisoned and tortured to try to force them to recant. Naturally it was religious groups that did this — terrified that their “perfect” world view was going to be shattered (and that some dumbass idea from their precious bible was about to be proven wrong), they tried to suppress curiosity, exploration, and scientific endeavor.

When the first real efforts to break the sound barrier were made, there was a sliver of humanity that was just as terrified of that process as our ancestors were of falling off the edge of the world. They legitimately believed breaking the sound barrier would destroy the Earth. They were wrong¹.

When we first started designing and testing nuclear weapons, there was a fear that detonating a nuclear bomb might incinerate the entire atmosphere, killing us all. That was wrong, too (we’ve tested lots of bombs and used two of them during combat).

When we put serious efforts into flying into space, again the religious loons came out of the woodwork to warn us that we were dabbling in “divine” territory and it would bring the end of us. They were wrong.

Now that we’re about to switch on the Large Hadron Collider for groundbreaking scientific research, people are sending death threats to the scientists doing the work, terrified that the machine will create little black holes that will kill us all.

I guess if your mind is so feeble that it’s able to conceive of (and believe in) a bearded guy in the sky who watches us for any chance he can get to damn us to an eternity burning in flames, it makes sense that you could actually buy this black hole bullshit.

What makes me laugh hardest about this is that the folks terrified of this doomsday scenario don’t even understand the science behind their scenario, much less the science that has built the collider in the first place. If you don’t grasp how the machine works, how can you accurately forecast the destruction of humanity, the Earth, the solar system, or even the universe, all stemming from a carefully planned effort to watch what happens when two atoms smash into each other at near-relativistic speeds.

Sadly, when we switch the collider on in a few days, and start learning more about how our universe works, everybody’s going to be so excited about what we learn from this machine that there won’t be any energy left to bitch-slap the fucking morons who freaked out little black holes. Nobody will try to punish the assholes who are threatening to kill these scientists for doing scientific work. And all this nonsense will crop up the next time the idiots get scared of something. Until then, I imagine they’ll crawl back under their rocks or into their caves once they realize “whoops, wrong again!”

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