Best and Worst Case Scenarios

Best Case: The Large Hadron Colliders’ ALICE experiment successfully creates quark-gluon plasma, a substance theorized to have existed just milliseconds after the Big Bang. By generating temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the sun, scientists hope to watch as this particle goo cools and expands into the particles that we know. That could help scientists answer why protons and neutrons weigh 100 times more than the quarks they’re made of.

Worst Case: Scientists inadvertently make a micro black hole, and the earth is quickly erased from existence. Scientists at CERN and elsewhere have ruled out the possibility that the LHC will create any kind of doomsday scenario. The black holes that the LHC could theoretically create don’t even have enough energy to light up a light bulb. On the other hand, the U.K.’s Astronomer Royal put the odds of destroying the world at 1 in 50 million (which puts it in the realm of possibilities but still not as likely as hitting the lottery).