The set of things out on the fringe of quantum possibilities (1 out of 10^100^100, for example, and beyond) is quite odd. The probability of your body spontaneously rearranging itself to be much younger is minuscule (to a degree of "minuscule" you've never thought about before) but non-zero, for instance.
However, it has been pointed out that if this is true, it is actually quite horrible. Reality may not permit you to fully die, but only a vanishing fraction of the vanishing fraction of realities involves you being anything like healthy; the maximal probability outcome by a long shot is you simple hanging on to a minimal life through a series of increasingly unlikely quantum events but never returning to anything like health.
Quantum-multiple-world believers better damn well hope it's not actually true. Actually, we all better damn well hope it's not true.
On a similar note, while it is funny to talk about how unlikely these events are, it seems to me that if the Higgs is offended about being observed and quantum-destroys the universes it is produced in, the way it would actually manifest is that it would seem that just as a particular particle collision is about to occur that would produce the Higgs, the resulting collision would simply conform to the probability distribution of the Higgs production, along with all the other possible outcomes, minus the Higgs production possibility. (That is, if it's 20% Higgs, 40% something with an anti-proton, 40% something with a proton, it'll manifest as an anomalous observation of 50% proton, 50% anti-proton.) The universe is not going to reach out across 10^52-ish planck instants to do something like drop bread on a machine weeks before it would be brought up; by far the maximum probability is that it would happen in the last few Planck instants, for each potential Higgs production. So, it's a fun story, but I don't see the probabilities adding up for it to be "true". Incidentally, if true, this may be able to be experimentally observed, in that we would be able to see the distorted outcome probabilities.
it seems to me that if the Higgs is offended about being observed and quantum-destroys the universes it is produced in
You seem to be conflating the "Higgs production does something funny to suppress the amplitude of possible histories leading to the event" hypothesis with the "LHC destroys the world with black holes/stable strangelets/vacuum energy state change/etc., so only futures with a broken LHC have humans around to observe" hypothesis. The net result is similar but the mechanism is different (unless it's equivalent in some weird quantum way--I don't pretend to be an expert on this stuff).
In either case, if each event has a chance of occurring during a particle collision, there must be some finite number of collisions beyond which some event such as "a fragment of Boltzmann Bread[0] appears in a critical component of the LHC" becomes more likely than "no world-ending event occurring in X collisions".
In particular, there's not a need for the universe to anthropomorphically "reach across" an extended range of time; under MWI assumptions, all the hypothetical LHC-stopping coincidences will happen anyway in some world of arbitrarily small likelihood, but if the LHC is unexpectedly omnicidal, only those unlikely universes will have future observers to look back and marvel at how strange it is.
"You seem to be conflating the "Higgs production does something funny to suppress the amplitude of possible histories leading to the event" hypothesis with the "LHC destroys the world with black holes/stable strangelets/vacuum energy state change/etc., so only futures with a broken LHC have humans around to observe" hypothesis."
No, I'm not. I'm really only talking about the suppressed amplitude case, as it is the only interesting thing. "Quantum suicide" is a direct, uninteresting, and hopefully untrue trivial consequence of MWI, and generalizing to civilizations is also trivial.
""a fragment of Boltzmann Bread[0] appears in a critical component of the LHC" becomes more likely than "no world-ending event occurring in X collisions"."
Ah, but you're getting caught up in the wrong formulation of the problem. The question is not "Is sticking a bit of bread in the wrong place going to prevent the Higgs from forming?", it is, "Given that the universe will attempt to prevent the Higgs from forming for the sake of argument, what is the most likely way in which it will manifest?"
Does sticking a bit of bread in the wrong place do the job? Yes. But it's a fantastically improbable manifestation of a quantum effect where merely "not forming the Higgs boson at time of collision" is way, way less improbable, what with the odds against a Higgs in the first place.
The probability of "bit o' quirky event plus a bit of bad design" is well in the domain of human experience. The probability of "this is the lowest-effort way the Universe could find to shut down the production of a Higgs" is absurdly small, when I can easily lay out "easier" things, including simply not making Higgs when the opportunity arises, which requires merely a couple of quantum zigs instead of zags within very small fractions of a second of the potential collision, rather than an enormously long chain of causation spanning human-perceivable time frames, all of which are unspeakably huge from the quantum world's viewpoint.
"while it is funny to talk about how unlikely these events are ..."
individually the scenarios may be highly improbable - but as a category, aren't there more ways a mechanical failure point could play out at the macroscopic level, than ways the particle collision event could spontaneously "mis-manifest"?
"The universe is not going to reach out across 10^52-ish planck instants to do something like drop bread on a machine weeks before it would be brought up"
a universe could reach out two weeks before, or a week plus 1 femto second, or it may drop cheese instead of bread, etc. - aren't there more histories like this across all the many-worlds, than ones involving last-moment quantum weirdness?
"individually the scenarios may be highly improbable - but as a category, aren't there more ways a mechanical failure point could play out at the macroscopic level, than ways the particle collision event could spontaneously "mis-manifest"?"
There are a lot more ways that a mechanical failure could manifest, yes, but it is simply drowned in the histories in which they don't manifest. Another one of those 10^100^100 sorts of numbers when we're talking at the quantum scale.
Whereas even if everything goes perfectly fine, Higgs production is expected to be a low probability event, and just having it "not happen" is way, way, way, way (and so on) way less "probability work", to coin an ill-defined phrase that has tantalizing mathematical overtones.
I didn't just make up the 10^52-ish number, I actually looked it up and tried to make it plausible. That's an awfully large branching factor for the universe to be reaching out to have an effect (ponder those 52 zeros for a moment; even if you drop half of them we're still well into la-la land) whereas as perverse as "a bird dropped a bit of bread on an exposed component" may seem, it is, frankly, well within normal human experience with probabilities, as is someone making the requisite design errors to permit that.
(I am just making up the 10^100^100 number. The probabilities are well beyond my intuition to guess at besides "effectively impossible by any reasonable definition of the term.")
I mean, I'm enjoying these articles and I enjoyed the linked article, but they are jokes. At least, I know the linked article is a joke and I hope the physicists saying these are actually possibly being caused by the Higgs are joking as they also ought to be able to do this analysis... although you just never know. The human tendency to anthropomorphize everything, to see "the universe will cause an improbable event to manifest" in terms of "humans will see something humanly absurd happen in a macroscopic scale" (noting humanly absurd != improbable) is very, very strong.
(Note that I do not consider the idea that the universe will somehow cancel any production of Higgs as a joke; that's perfectly respectable physics. I just consider it a joke that it would manifest in some macroscopic way weeks before the event.)
However, it has been pointed out that if this is true, it is actually quite horrible. Reality may not permit you to fully die, but only a vanishing fraction of the vanishing fraction of realities involves you being anything like healthy; the maximal probability outcome by a long shot is you simple hanging on to a minimal life through a series of increasingly unlikely quantum events but never returning to anything like health.
Quantum-multiple-world believers better damn well hope it's not actually true. Actually, we all better damn well hope it's not true.
On a similar note, while it is funny to talk about how unlikely these events are, it seems to me that if the Higgs is offended about being observed and quantum-destroys the universes it is produced in, the way it would actually manifest is that it would seem that just as a particular particle collision is about to occur that would produce the Higgs, the resulting collision would simply conform to the probability distribution of the Higgs production, along with all the other possible outcomes, minus the Higgs production possibility. (That is, if it's 20% Higgs, 40% something with an anti-proton, 40% something with a proton, it'll manifest as an anomalous observation of 50% proton, 50% anti-proton.) The universe is not going to reach out across 10^52-ish planck instants to do something like drop bread on a machine weeks before it would be brought up; by far the maximum probability is that it would happen in the last few Planck instants, for each potential Higgs production. So, it's a fun story, but I don't see the probabilities adding up for it to be "true". Incidentally, if true, this may be able to be experimentally observed, in that we would be able to see the distorted outcome probabilities.