Swans on Tea

And I still feel fine.

The latest brouhaha, of course is the LHC, which is supposed to destroy us all, but this is not the first time that science, some (quasi-) scientific phenomenon, or scientists, have supposedly threatened to pushed us into the abyss. Here’s a sampling of recent scenarios, ignoring the many-more-numerous armageddon/rapture predictions (there are some people who have predicted the end of the world numbering in double digits, and yet their credibility with their followers seems undiminished)

Leading up to its startup in 2000, amid all of the Y2k and Millennium hype, the relativistic heavy-ion collider (RHIC) was supposed to do almost exactly the same thing as the LHC: make baby black holes that would devour us.

In 2003, it was was feared (by some) that the Galileo probe, scheduled to crash into Jupiter, would initiate a fusion reaction, either igniting it like a star, or blowing it up in a massive explosion.

2003 was also to have brought Planet X close to earth, amid cataclysm, wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

In 1999, the Cassini probe did a flyby of earth in a slingshot maneuver to send it to Saturn, and was going to be the death of us all (some especially egregious physics in that one)

1997 was to have the earth enter the “photon belt” which would cause electrical disruption and, paradoxically, several days of total darkness.

In March of 1982, it was the planetary “alignment,” when all nine of the planets (Pluto was still an evil conspirator back then) were within a sector of less than 100 degrees in the so-called “Jupiter Effect” that was supposed to cause earthquakes and other other disasters (I got a cool night of viewing out of this, since it was so easy to see Mars, Jupiter and Saturn)

yaddayaddayaddayaddayadda LEONARD BERNSTEIN