evidence: Five 'Scary' Experiments That Did Not Destroy The World Scanning YouTube for popular science videos, I found a jewel — clocking over 10 million views — titled "Five Experiments That Could Have Destroyed The World." [...] - Large Hadron Collider. The behemoth particle accelerator from the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research (CERN) located near Geneva, Switzerland, was designed to collide beams of protons moving nearly at the speed of light. On July 4, 2012, scientists reported the discovery of the Higgs boson after a four-decade-long search, a triumph of modern technology and advanced particle physics. The collisions can produce mini black holes, a possibility that prompted many to fear that such objects would grow uncontrollably, swallowing the planet whole. Again, detailed calculations showed this to be nearly impossible: The mini black holes would evaporate in fractions of a second. Furthermore, collisions of even higher energies occur frequently when cosmic rays — particles traveling through space — hit the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere. If we have survived for more than 4 billion years, we should be safe from the LHC experiments.