sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable

All the news-flap today concerning the first full circuit of the main ring of the LHC today was equally amusing and frustrating; whilst all the nonsense concerning rampaging swarms of miniature black holes (admittedly some very small things such as methane/carbon dioxide molecules or bacteria, viruses and prions can have a devastating effect on humanity, miniature black holes involving less matter than a grain of sand are really not worth losing any sleep over) and suchlike at least grabs people by the ears (hopefully drawing a few in enough to read further, get some facts and find a new interest) some aspects of the debate (particularly the non-financial-reason detractors visible on threads like that) show that there are far more tricksy problems in the world than creating an instrument capable of both generating collision energies up to 14 TeV and then detecting enough of the results to be able to flesh out the existing model of quantum chromodynamics and pencil in the answers to a few of the outstanding whys of physics (whilst adding several more).

In any case anyone frightened of the world ending can relax until next year as it'll take a wee while to get everything calibrated before it starts running at full tilt. As always the motivations of those attempting legal action has to be wondered at... are they just trying to attract attention for good or ill, waste some cash on legal processes or just slow everything down a bit or do they genuinely believe that "there is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies"? Still, people evidently believe stranger things (and publish them on the BBC comment threads for all to see) though it's equally possible that they're just doing it for a laugh. Let's hope...