The LHC is designed to collide two counter-rotating beams of protons or heavy ions. Proton-proton collisions are foreseen at an energy of 7 TeV per beam. An equivalent energy in the centre of mass would be obtained in the collision of a cosmic-ray proton with a fixed target such as the Earth or some other astronomical body if its energy reaches or exceeds 10^8 GeV, i.e., 10^17 e. When the LHC attains its design collision rate, it will produce about a billion proton-proton collisions per second in each of the major detectors ATLAS and CMS. The effective amount of time each year that the LHC will produce collisions at this average luminosity is about ten million seconds. Hence, each of the two major detectors is expecting to obtain about 10^17 proton-proton collisions over the planned duration of the experiments.
[The] highest-energy cosmic rays observed attain energies of around 10^20 eV, and the total flux of cosmic rays with energies of 10^17 eV or more that hit each square centimeter of the Earth’s surface is measured to be about 5x10^–14 per second. The area of the Earth’s surface is about 5x10^18 square centimeters, and the age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years. Therefore, over 3x10^22 cosmic rays with energies of 10^17 eV or more, equal to or greater than the LHC energy, have struck the Earth’s surface since its formation. This means that Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth already – and the planet still exists.
Other astronomical bodies are even larger. For example, the radius of Jupiter is about ten times that of the Earth, and the radius of the Sun is a factor of ten larger still. The surface area of the Sun is therefore 10,000 times that of the Earth, and Nature has therefore already conducted the LHC experimental programme about one billion times via the collisions of cosmic rays with the Sun – and the Sun still exists.
Moreover, our Milky Way galaxy contains about 10^11 stars with sizes similar to our Sun, and there are about 10^11 similar galaxies in the visible Universe. Cosmic rays have been hitting all these stars at rates similar to collisions with our own Sun. This means that Nature has already completed about 10^31 LHC experimental programmes since the beginning of the Universe. Moreover, each second, the Universe is continuing to repeat about 3x10^13 complete LHC experiments. There is no indication that any of these previous “LHC experiments” has ever had any large-scale consequences. The stars in our galaxy and others still exist, and conventional astrophysics can explain all the astrophysical black holes detected.
