Could a black hole at the LHC end the world?

There is an article at the Sydney Morning Herald that talks about the possibility of a Black Hole being made at the LHC and destroying the Earth. This issue seems to pop up quite often when starting up a new accelerator. Needless to say, there's nothing to worry about.

They asked "What do you think? Is it worth playing the odds?" and posted everyone's responses on the site. Here's the comment I left.

It's absolutely worth it.

As pointed out in the list of threats in the Wikipedia article linked above, the particle collisions that will be produced at the LHC are similar to those that occur naturally in our atmosphere anyway. Cosmic rays (mainly protons) with much higher energy than those to be used in the LHC experiment collide with protons in the atmosphere, and have done so since the beginning of our solar system. The collision energy of a single proton at the LHC is equivalent to 10^5 TeV, whereas cosmic rays have been observed with energies as high as 10^8 TeV, about 1000 times higher.

If there was any danger of a stable black hole or some other dangerous matter forming in collisions at these energies, then we would have been wiped out already.

I can't wait to see the first results from this machine when it gets up and running in a year or so. It will hopefully tell us a lot more about why our universe is here, and deliver a few suprises along the way.

As someone else pointed out though, it might just be a cunning way for the experiment to get a bit of publicity. Works well for the experiment, and gives the media something else that they can hype up. Everyone's a winner.