You’ll be glad to know that there’s at least a possibility that all the stuff that seems so dire about our world–credit crisis, failing banks, Iranian nukes, Israeli-Palestinian war, terrorism, the Oscars shunning The Dark Knight–may not matter come this summer. According to Fox News:

Still worried that the Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole that will destroy the Earth when it’s finally switched on this summer?

Um, well, you may have a point.

Three physicists have reexamined the math surrounding the creation of microscopic black holes in the Switzerland-based LHC, the world’s largest particle collider, and determined that they won’t simply evaporate in a millisecond as had previously been predicted.

“Reexamined the math.” Don’t you just love it when the fate of the world hangs on the question of whether someone forgot to carry the 2?

Rather, Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama say mini black holes could exist for much longer — perhaps even more than a second, a relative eternity in particle colliders, where most objects decay much faster.

Kind of like the ethics of some politicians.

Under such long-lived conditions, it becomes a race between how fast a black hole can decay — and how fast it can gobble up matter to grow bigger and prevent itself from decaying.

Kind of like Michael Moore.

Casadio, Fabi and Harms think the black hole would lose out, and pass through the Earth or out of the atmosphere before it got to be a problem.

“We conclude that … the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible. Nonetheless, it remains true that the expected decay times are much longer (and possibly >> 1 second) than is typically predicted by other models,” the three state in a brief paper posted at the scientific discussion Web site ArXiv.org.

Well, that’s good to know.Of course, it does rather seem like the philosophy adopted by a voracious dog in the Mystery Science Theater presentation of 60s British sci-fi flick The Deadly Bees:

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