Once the eggheads at CERN and Fermilab fire up the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the results could be catastrophic in a comic book kind of way, except we don’t have Superman around to fix things if that happens.

I’d settle for one of Mister Miracle’s Mother Boxes if the LHC really screws the cosmic pooch. Some people think looking for answers to the most challenging questions in science could result in Planet Earth being rendered into a humorous pancake shape across the universe, per MSNBC’s Cosmic Log:

Some folks outside the scientific mainstream have asked darker questions as well: Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into “strangelets” that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?

Former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner has been raising such questions for years - first about an earlier-generation “big bang machine” known as the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, and more recently about the LHC.

Last Friday, Wagner and another critic of the LHC’s safety measures, Luis Sancho, filed a lawsuit in Hawaii’s U.S. District Court. The suit calls on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to ease up on their LHC preparations for several months while the collider’s safety was reassessed.

Can’t these big brains come up with something that will give me superpowers? Is it too much to want to fly without a boarding pass, or even an airplane?

But I digress. Advances in science come by poking at the wobbly bits and seeing what happens. LHC will do this. If I end up as a rapidly expanding cloud of nanomolecular red mist because of it, I assure you I’m filing a complaint with someone.