Three Sips of Tepid Iced Tea...

Right, let's talk about this recent nonsense with the LHC being turned on at CERN. First is this talk of black holes being created and potentially enveloping the planet. A stable black hole needs a huge amount of collapsed and concentrated mass. What you need is one of these:

And you need one many times bigger than ours. A black hole is one of the potential ways a star can go. As the star burns itself up it shrinks. The more it shrinks, the more dense it becomes and the more gravitational pull it has.  Every physical object has a gravitational pull; you, me a can of beer, everything. But it requires something huge to actually emit gravity that's noticeable on a macroscopic scale. You need a planet, or a star. As said, the star burns up fuel, and without expelling waste into space it pushes it to the middle, more and more mass builds up and the sun sucks itself in until it becomes tiny, really tiny. This is what we call a singularity; a star that is super tiny and super heavy and with gravity so strong that photons (the particles that make up light and can only be seen when they impact a surface) are pulled into it's gravity well. Which is why we call it a black hole; as not even light can escape.  
The red arrows show light escaping from the sun and as we progress forwards in time they struggle to escape until they reach the event horizon, the point at which light does not escape the star.  What we have at CERN is single particles shooting around and hitting each other at close to the speed of light in an attempt to recreate the forces around a black hole and probably at the beginning of the universe.  

Now although these particles accelerations will recreate the forces and effects of a black hole it is simply not possible to actually create a black hole using two or three particles.  As before, you need a lot more particles, in a lot smaller space.  

The other good one I heard was that we could be opening portals to other dimensions and letting strange creatures in. I think it was literally that wording, on a cover of something like the Daily 'We Fear Change' Mail.  This is spawned from an old theory that black holes could create so much gravity that they actually break space-time and create a hole through to a parallel universe. 

Current theories state that universes are stacked up like playing cards.  Large objects make a dent in the universe called a gravity well, which looks like this:

It's thought that with enough gravity it might be possible to break through that sheet of space time and link to another like this;

This is called a wormhole or an Einstein-Rosen bridge. Were this mad bit of science fiction even possible or doable by us, using a reaction that happens all around us all the time, then we'd have nothing to fear anyway. Multiverse theories (that there are many universes in playing card format) say that an infinite amount of new universes are created at every infinitesimal moment and that the ones most like ours are the ones closest. So even if we opened up a gate to a parallel universe we'd just be looking at ourselves feeling the exact same way. 

You have to remember that the kind of reactions and experiments being done are going on around us all the time naturally anyway, next to your ears and in the sky above you. 

So in the future, when some people decide to dedicate their lives to progress and knowledge instead of finding nice shoes or going partying, and decide to take a chance and a leap into the unknown hoping to find solid ground, don't start running and cowering in fear. Try and embrace that some of them are astronauts, and some of you are astrologers.

(Oh and by the way the RHIC in New York, which is pretty much the same thing has been running fine and dandy for the last 8 years.)