Why the world won't end, part 8

Ron Bailey deconstructs the application of the precautionary principle to the Large Hadron Collider:

[T]he empirical evidence is that the universe has been running trillions of these high-energy physics “experiments” for billions of years without disastrous results. In fact, Ord’s colleagues Nick Bostrom and Max Tegmark from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculate that the empirical evidence suggests a conservative estimate of the annual risk that LHC-like experiments would destroy the earth is 1-in-a-trillion.

As I’ve mentioned before, the precautionary principle cuts both ways. What if, because we neglected to do the LHC experiments, we didn’t know some crucial bit of physics that was the only way we could avoid some future calamity on Earth? Certainly, the chances of that coming to pass aren’t terribly high. Then again the chances aren’t zero, are they?