All scenarios / Technology
Collider Black Hole
CERN swears it's fine.
What it is
Before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started up in 2008, some people feared it could create a microscopic black hole that would swallow the Earth.
Why it ranks where it does
CERN's safety reviews found no basis for any conceivable threat. Cosmic rays have been hitting Earth, the Moon, the Sun and dense neutron stars with collisions far more energetic than the LHC's for billions of years, and those bodies are all still here. Even if a micro black hole formed, theory predicts it would evaporate almost instantly.
Evidence on the board
- Cosmic rays have run these experiments for billions of years. We're still here.
What the experts say
The LHC has run for more than 15 years, discovered the Higgs boson and produced no black holes. Physicists consider this risk effectively zero.
The movie vs. reality
Fears about the LHC led to lawsuits and alarming headlines before its 2008 start-up, and it still turns up in conspiracy videos. The physics is reassuring. To make a black hole, you'd need to squeeze enormous mass into a tiny space, and the LHC's collisions involve the energy of a few flying mosquitoes concentrated into a subatomic point. A micro black hole could only appear at all if certain extra-dimension theories turned out to be true. Even then, Hawking radiation would make it vanish in a tiny fraction of a second.
What would move the number
Up
- Nothing on the horizon
Down
- Already at zero
Live signals we track
The baseline above is set from the evidence as of October 13, 2026. On the live board, your browser adjusts it in real time using these feeds. Chatter can only nudge a score in proportion to its evidence, so attention alone can't make an unlikely scenario look likely.
- Public attention: daily Wikipedia pageviews for Safety of high-energy particle collision experiments
- Online chatter: Hacker News stories mentioning "CERN black hole" this week vs. the prior eight weeks
Sources
- CERN: The Large Hadron Collider
https://home.cern/science/accelerators/large-hadron-collider/ - Wikipedia: Safety of high-energy particle collision experiments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_high-energy_particle_collision_experiments
Baseline scores are an editorial threat index from 0 to 100 that combines current reporting with published expert estimates. They're meant for comparing risks, not as actuarial forecasts. See how the numbers work.