Instant extinction lotto

Asked to choose between scientific rationalism and some of the scarier manifestations of unreason, most of us would naturally opt for the former. And have. But what if the two were mislabeled, to some extent? What if their contents were less distinct than we'd been led to believe? I ask because lately the monsters of irrationality -- the wild-eyed jihadist, the domestic ideologue with a truck full of fertilizer -- are being given a run for their money by the nightmares of reason.

Looking to cheer myself up the other day, I opened the newspaper to learn that there exists the remote possibility that the Large Hadron Collider, a proton-smashing machine located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva and due to be fired up this summer, could conceivably produce particles that would instantly end all life on Earth: the jay on the house across the street, the cat on the bed, my daughter walking back from the school bus. Something to think about. All history, all we've been and all we could have been, gone in one unfathomable instant; the Earth collapsed, according to the experts, into a dead, dense lump.

I deferred the sports section and read on. As far as I could make out, there was some debate about the likelihood of annihilation. Two groups of physicists had crunched the numbers and found the chances negligible. A Cambridge University cosmologist, on the other hand, called such probability estimates no better than "informed betting odds." A co-Nobel Peace Prize winner and nuclear physicist had written a paper titled "Might a Laboratory Experiment Destroy Planet Earth?" His conclusion seemed to be that it was very unlikely, though not impossible. Another scientist had used the method employed by insurance companies to calculate the risk, multiplying the disaster probability and the cost -- that is, the loss of the global population; he did not find the results comforting. A report put the odds of disaster at less than 1 in 50 million, roughly the odds of winning some lottery jackpots. I gathered I was supposed to find this reassuring.

As a novelist, admittedly, the only dark matter I know anything at all about is the human heart. Then again, my inability to judge this threat -- a thing so overwhelming in its implications, so searing to the imagination that it cannot be apprehended except through the protective film of irony -- may be precisely the point. No one can. The high priests of theoretical physics argue among themselves; Cambridge scientists consult the actuarial tables; the rest of us proceed on faith. We have no choice. These things are beyond our ken, we are told; best to leave them to the experts who, after all, are men of reason.