Okay, I do. But only if we do it with bombs. What I don’t care about is if we blow up the world with science. It’s hard to have a conversation about the Large Hadron Collider, or read one in the media, without someone interjecting with “We don’t know the consequences of colliding these particles! What if it creates a black hole and destroys the earth?” The prospect of total annihilation in the name of scientific discovery isn’t really very likely, but even if it was, it shouldn’t bother us in the least.
Brookhaven National Laboratory
To speak to the black hole thing, it happened this one time at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. And only for the smallest fraction of a second. It’s not like it got to the size of a Volkswagon and sucked up three interns before they shut it off. One time, and nobody broke anything, so let’s call it a wash. Actually, let’s call it a breakthrough into something we’re not really sure about (these are the best kinds). If scientists are trying to destroy the world, they could certainly be doing a better job.
But of course, they’re not. They’re trying to understand it. We love watching movies about science getting out of hand though, whether by creating zombies, manipulating natural disasters, or calling aliens down on our planet. The Scipocalypse is big business, mostly because we 
love thinking about the end of the world. Asteroids or zombies, it fascinates us. We all know that one day, we’ll die. But what if everyone died? What if it was the last day, and what if it came with a whimper, instead of a bang? Someone in a labcoat flicks a switch and everything just goes away. No cunning plans to survive the apocalypse, no sending Bruce Willis into space to kick an asteroid’s ass, just a quiet “pop!” To keep that from happening, we should curtail all this weird science involving billion dollar machines and tiny, tiny particles, studying viruses, sending signals to space, or whatever the fear flavour of the month is.
No, we shouldn’t. I don’t care. I don’t care if we blow up the world in our scientific follies, because more often than not, the change these studies bring is positive. There isn’t any better time to be alive than now, not just in developed nations, but anywhere. A lot of what we have is built on these scientific risks, such as they are. The health, wealth, and opportunities we enjoy, the ability to communicate and extend our compassion over long distances, and the power to step out into our solar system. A hundred years ago, it was all fiction. It’d be foolish of me to ignore the tragedies these things are built on, but those most often come from application, not experimentation.
There are a lot of ways for the world to end that I do worry about. Destroying our environment, the collapse of our economies, the unsustainable nature of our lifestyles, and lately plain or war, those keep me up at night. They’re big, systemic problems. But physics? Biology? Astronomy? These show the best in us, that we’re willing to invest ourselves into understanding the universe around us, in the same way that art and culture show that we strive to understand our relationship to ourselves and our space. If these brought about the human race’s downfall, then we would descend at our noblest. Frankly, there’s a lot worse ways to leave this world than trying to understand it. Bring on the science.
