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Planet Survival, Pro and ConWill the earth be obliterated by Labor Day? What the Times didn't tell you.

By Timothy NoahUpdated Friday, June 27, 2008, at 7:15 PM ET

The New York Times keeps reporting that there may be an itty-bitty chance that when the Large Hadron Collider at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), located just outside Geneva, Switzerland, gets switched on late in August, the world will come to an end. But probably there is no such chance, even an itty-bitty one.

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A story like this poses difficult questions about news placement.

If there's even a microscopic chance that human agency will destroy the planet—the CERN accelerator is the world's largest—then surely this news belongs on Page One. That's how the Times played it on March 29 with Dennis Overbye's story, "Asking A Judge To Save the World, and Maybe A Whole Lot More."

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On the other hand, news stories announcing even a microscopic chance that human agency will destroy the planet risk creating worldwide panic. After all, as my friend Gregg Easterbrook pointed out in a fine cover piece in the June Atlantic ("The Sky Is Falling"), it's much likelier that humankind will be wiped out by an asteroid. In the piece, Easterbrook reported that an asteroid specialist for the Air Force put the likelihood of a "dangerous space-object" collision in any given century at one in 10. (Caveat: Not all such collision scenarios, which include comets and meteors in addition to asteroids, posit the destruction of all human life on the planet.)

The Times has kept follow-ups to the end-of-the-world story off Page One. Overbye published an explanatory essay in the paper's science section on April 15, and on June 21 he published deep inside the Times A section a news story bearing the whimsical headline, "Earth Will Survive After All, Physicists Say." On June 27, Overbye reported, again inside the Times A section, that the United States was seeking to dismiss a lawsuit by two worried citizens aimed at preventing anyone from throwing the big switch at the Large Hadron Collider. The government's principal response, I'm sorry to report, wasn't that there's no chance that switching on the Large Hadron Collider will bring about the end of the world, but rather that a six-year statute of limitations has already passed.

I can well understand why the Times doesn't want to give sustained big play to the possibility that the world will end on or around Labor Day. In addition to the civic-minded concern that this might create worldwide panic, there are practical matters of self-interest. If the possibility weren't realized, as most scientists seem to expect, then the Times would look foolish. If the possibility were realized, it would have no opportunity to collect a Pulitzer, because the Times, the Pulitzer board, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which gives out the award, and every last Times reader would all be obliterated, along with the rest of the planet.