EVE OF DESTRUCTION

A most peculiar spider

Wednesday morning came and went, and the earth was not sucked up into a black hole due to the Large Hadron Collider being switched on. Although I gather a number of kettles in the Geneva area blew a fuse around 8.30. If you want to know what it's all about, and have seven or eight minutes to kill, check out this BBC Horizon podcast LHC for dummies, where they explain how your front room is made of treacle (which increases the chances of the moon being made of cream cheese) and they're looking for some bloke called Higgs. Anybody could have told them he was in Guantanamo Bay but has gone back to Australia now. The bloke with the Russian accent had the best quote: "Science is what we do when we don't know what we're doing". So reassuring.

It appears, however, that if a baby black hole was created, it would not hoover everything up in a fraction of a second, but might take as much as four years. I bet David Cameron and Barack Obama are not looking so smug now. How would you like to be the man (or woman) who leads your country into a black hole. What kind of policies would you need to instigate?

If I were in charge, I would immediately issue a copy of Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" to every member of the population. It's tag line "Don't Panic" is the only sensible thing to say under the circumstances. In fact, the Hadron Collider almost sounds as if it could have been invented by Douglas Adams, the man who gave us the Total Perspective Vortex, the Heart of Gold, and Deep Thought, the second most powerful computer ever invented, which produced the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. All right, don't all shout at once, we all know what the answer is.

They could of course abolish income tax, which would make them very popular. But if we were really heading for a black hole, I suspect most people would give up going to work anyway, let alone voting. It's now-or-never time, your last chance to try something you'd always wanted to do but never dared or could afford before. Even if it's illegal. You could kill your boss, for example. Or your husband/wife. You'd go to jail, but the world would end before your case came up. Some people might try heroin, or have sex with a total stranger. The Sun, ever one to reassure the public, gave some helpful suggestions as to how you could pass the time, which included trying out all 64 kama sutra positions, or eating 27 Big Macs.
I might start having a second small sherry before dinner.

If the world is really going to go phut in four years, it's not the best time to start a diet, or take out a mortgage. There will of course be idiots who will take out life insurance or put a bet on at William Hill at 1000-1. D'oh. It might be worth signing up to do a degree in astrophysics, there's an outside chance you could head this thing off at the pass. Building a rocket won't help, the rocket would be sucked into the black hole too. Although you can bet your bottom dollar Jeremy Clarkson will try.

Religious groups will have a field day. People who can translate "I told you so" into obscure languages will be much sought after.

Either way, I'd put money on three of the most popular names for babies next year being Gustav, Ike and Hadron. Nothing catches people's imagination like looming oblivion.

How will you while away the next four years waiting for the end of time? Well, you could start by seeing how the young boffins at CERN choose to explain the experiment, here: