Today I had to convince several teenage girls that the end of the world wasn’t imminent.  The students of the school I work at had just heard about the Large Hadron Collider and were now sure that tomorrow morning the entire planet would be sucked into a black hole somewhere on the French/Swiss border.  I had to convince them that the chance of that happening was incredibly tiny and that the potentially black hole-inducing experiment doesn’t take place for about a month anyway, but they weren’t convinced.

If the scientists are wrong and the girls are right and the world does end tomorrow it might not be a bad thing anyway.  Here are some of the things to be cheerful about in the fraction of a second it takes for the that black hole to suck you into oblivion:

1. We might be sucked into an alternative dimension

No-one knows exactly what happens when you go through a black hole.  Maybe we’ll end up in an alternative dimension; one where there’s no poverty, one where we all live in peace and one where Apple actually released some decent new products at their ‘Let’s Rock’ event today (iTunes Genius? Just a glorified recommendations engine geared up for selling more music through the Music Store).

2. We’ll be spared Google’s Orwellian future

Now they’ve got their own browser they can find out everything about what we do online, they can take photos of us in our houses (’unintentionally’, so they say) with Streetview and they want all the world’s information.  It can only be a matter of time before they get it and the US government nationalises Google to bring all that information into their own hands.  Then we’re all doomed.

3. MTV won’t make any more programmes. Ever.

Flavor of Love, A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila, My Super Sweet 16…  All braindead ‘youth entertainment’ formats will cease to exist – come friendly black hole and destroy us all now!

4. The end of Lost won’t be disappointing.

With two seasons left, Lost has fans on the edge of their seats.  How will they explain the polar bears, teleportation and time travel?  If it all ends tomorrow we’ll never have to put up with the inevitably disappointing, contrived conclusion.

I’m sure there are many more reasons to be cheerful.  Feel free to add yours in the comments…