Theories of existence and the Large Hadron Collider

Apparently, there are twelve different types of particles in the universe. I’d only remembered there being atoms. Or at the most, protons, neutrons, and electrons. Or ions, maybe (which I learned about from TIE-fighters). But I guess there’s also neutrinos (or was it Neutrin-O!s?) and proteons, and these are actually just different types of quarks (I think), and if I try to go beyond that I’m going to have to start making things up. And this isn’t really that kind of piece (unlike every solution to the airplane-treadmill question).
What kind of piece is this? Well, I recently completed Brett Easton Ellis’ seminal novel Less Than Zer0 (note: I bet that Brett felt stupid about that “0” later, or at least mad at his publisher) and it left me, as it no doubt will or at least has at one time left you (that time being at least the first time you read it) with a feeling of meaninglessness, like nothing before had ever filled you with meaninglessness. Part of this is because it has no beginning, no end (does that count as a spoiler alert?) but is simply a randomly chosen time frame.
So then what kind of piece is Less Than Zer0? In the novel "The End of The Affair," Graham Greene doesn’t exactly have a beginning, although he does have an introduction. His introduction notes that a story doesn’t really have a beginning or an end, but simply the point at which we choose to begin telling, and the point at which we choose to end telling (and if I hadn’t given away my copy of this book after the first time I’d read it, I could properly quote the master). Of course, Greene chose to end his book in a very tidy manner that, despite also leaving you feeling meaningless, was at least somewhat contextual with itself. The chosen beginning and end points correspond directly with events in the story.
Ellis’ book, on the other hand, begins and ends with points of time that exist no matter what the characters do – it will end here, whether anything has been achieved or not. Which is really, I suppose, how life is. You’re born at a pretty randomly chosen point, if you think about it, and it is very possible your life will end before its events have really come to a suitable conclusion – even if (perhaps especially if) you choose the moment of ending. And so what if you have wrapped things up? “Life” as a concept goes on. You may have finished that novel, but human existence still seems to build to nothing. Your own life was just a randomly chosen spot to begin and then end the telling of a story that doesn’t have any boundaries, and the only thing unique to your part of it is your viewpoint.
Which is why I’m excited about the Large Hadron Collider, the giant proton-collider that will produce many of those twelve particles that haven’t really ben around that much since the Big Bang. People have raised fears that the thing could get out of control, and create a black hole that would suck the earth into it, and that creating conditions like the Big Bang is dangerous because, well, we just tend to be nervous around big bangs (like Debbie Gibson!).
It’s possible that I’m able to look at this concern with excitement because it has largely been discredited by experts in the field, and even the worrywarts don’t think it’s that likely. But it’s also that this could be it. If this thing does what it is allegedly capable of, this could be the reason that humans were put on earth – or, from a Darwinist point of view, the pinnacle of the evolutionary process. We are put on Earth (or in the Universe) to end it.
It seems pretty morbid when you consider genocide, and war, and global warming, and Gas Prices, and The Hills. But consider this: the Large Hadron Collider creates a black hole, surrounded by particles almost completely absent since the big bang. This black hole for some reason is super-strong, and as it quickly swallows the Earth, thereby gaining gravitational pull, it pulls in the Moon, then Mars, and so on, and rapidly (relative to the Universe, that is – we’re all dead, our time doesn’t matter) sucks all matter and antimatter into itself, and the pure density swallows in on itself until the entire thing gets down to the size of a pin, and the one last particle that is left in the entire universe that wasn’t sucked in collides with this tiny thing and, boom. Big Bang. It all starts again.
To put it another way, according to legends from Pandora’s Box to Eve’s apple, to some other less Judaeo-Christian, Western-centric tales, Man’s real journey from beast to what he is began with the desire for knowledge. And now, some of us (the height of our species evolution?) have discovered the knowledge needed to end - and possibly, ironically, create - the Universe; Gods in our own image, we have learned all that we need to know.