While global warming may be walking us in slow motion toward widespread destruction and misery, European scientists are devising ways to zippily end life as we know it - if not gobble up the earth wholesale.

Okay, not really.

But that's what a couple of Americans are contending a particle accelerator project at the European Center for Nuclear Research will do - blasting bits together that could create a black hole on earth (which all of us would collapse into, I'm guessing, in a matter of milliseconds) or other strange things called magnetic monopoles and, um, "strangelets."

Scary stuff. So scary, in fact, that I'm going to blindly put my faith in those European scientists that they know exactly what they're doing.

And if I and they are wrong - I look forward to having my mass smashed in with y'all in infinitely dense space.