Yesterday, my flatmate came into my room and asked, "Are we going to die tomorrow?" Cern, the European laboratory for particle physics, has apparently chosen today to try to recreate the big bang, using an atom-smashing machine called a Large Hadron Collider - and a chemistry professor named Otto Rössler, among other scientists, thinks it "quite plausible" that the experiment will create black holes that will "survive and grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside".
Knowing almost nothing about particle physics, I consoled my flatmate: "I'm sure they know what they're doing." And if they're wrong?, she persisted. "Then you won't have to go to work on Thursday," I pointed out. This seemed to cheer her up, until I said, "Because you won't exist."
But everyone not existing wouldn't be so terrible. The most frustrating part of being dead has to be that life goes on without you: that everybody else is enjoying themselves, playing triple-letter-word scores in Scrabble, reading engrossing books you couldn't have read because they hadn't been written yet.
And a black hole's the last place you'd want to be left alive in anyway. We can't avoid dying, but if the Earth does get hoovered into oblivion today, we'll all bypass the fear and suffering that go along with the average death. Unless you're worrying about impending apocalyptic doom right now, that is.
"But there are so many things I could have done with my life!" some people lament. They usually have gallant things in mind: saving an elderly cat from the jaws of a dustcart, or winning a Pulitzer and being heralded as a genius by people they like and fancy, forever. No one ever says: "I could have killed someone accidentally and done 10 years in jail for it!" In any event, the chances are that most of us would have spent the extra time drinking tea on the sofa.
In case you're worried, we're all going to be fine. Even if we're not, we won't know it, so in a sense that's still fine. In the maxim commonly used when people are trying to be bleak and miserable, "We all die alone." Not this time.
Above all, if we disappear together today, we'll be dying for a great reason: the noble cause of scientific advancement, on a mission to discover more about how the universe works. Seriously: will that really be the end of the world?
Ariane Sherine, a TV comedy writer.