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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

The LHC collision energy is around 7 TeV. GZK limit (theoretical maximum cosmic ray energy) is about 50,000,000 TeV. Particles have been observed with energies above the GZK limit.

You know the Higgs Boson as the "god particle". Well, there's also the "oh my god particle", which was a cosmic ray with observed energy on the order of 300,000,000 TeV.

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However, only a small fraction of this energy would be available for an interaction with a proton or neutron on Earth, with most of the energy remaining in the form of kinetic energy of the products of the interaction. The effective energy available for such a collision is the square root of double the product of the particle's energy and the mass energy of the proton, which for this particle gives 7.5×1014 eV, roughly 50 times the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider.

So, still not an issue, but not quite as far from omg collision energy's. And still no where near what can happen in and near black holes.

But the center of mass energy for a GZK proton colliding with a proton in the air is something like 100 TeV - 1 PeV. So still quite a bit higher than the LHC, but not by a factor of 10^7.

If the highest energy cosmic rays are nuclei, the energies available for particle production are comparable.

Video that explains it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTBvPxQIFts

for reference, the single particle had about as much kinetic energy as a pitched baseball, consider that trillions of photons and other particles normally hit you every second.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_my_god_particle

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