I don’t understand this attitude. Why should I worry about things greater than the death of myself and my loved ones? After that, my universe ceases to exist. I can’t see any functional difference between destroying humanity and destroying the universe. Either way we’re all dead.
I’m just saying that’s what you should be worried about. The risk to yourself, and every last human separately, of a rogue piano falling on you are orders of magnitude higher than any risk of black holes from all the atom smashers on the planet. Either way you’re dead. And you can do something about it by living secluded in a grounded, concrete bunker. It’s costs versus the risk, man.
That’s why I emphasized risk being severity times probability. You’re only focusing on severity. If that is all you focus on, believe me there are many more severely horrible things that could happen to us besides unleashing a black hole on Earth. But they, like this LHC black hole, are so exceptionally improbable as to be practically impossible.
Wasn’t there speculation during the Manhattan project that the nuclear chain reaction might not ever stop, and might consume the whole atmosphere/planet/whatever?
Not sure about the LHC, but the guy quoted by Argent Towers is wrong in one respect. His rebuttal of Hawking Radiation is nonsensical. Hawking never intended his theory to explain the rarity of black holes.
A normal (ie not supermassive) black hole would take 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to evaporate by Hawking radiation.
As current cosmology estimates the age of the univese at only 13.7 billion years, the lifecycle of black holes is not going to be relevant for some time…
Yeah, I seem to recall being told that was considered, by a minority, a possibility.
But seriously, it’s clear at this point that nothing anyone says is going to persuade Argent Towers off his alarmist stance. He should just agree that different people have different risk tolerances and put the thread(s) to bed.
I just finished “The Making Of The Atomic Bomb” a few weeks ago and that is mentioned. It was idle speculation by one person on the project and some simple math by others quickly showed that it was not going to happen. It makes a cool story though (I heard that it was part of the betting pool on the yield of the Trinity test, some servicemen heard about it and panicked).
Well, what I just learned about this supposed risk (assuming the likelihood that a landing party of armed aliens intent on conquest is greater is not enough to put your mind to rest) tells me that the black hole produced would not eat up the planet in anything less than the probable age of the Sun. The Swartzchild radius of the putative object is on the order of 10[sup]-23[/sup] meters. The radius of a proton, or neutron is on the order of 10[sup]-15[/sup] meters. That means that the Black Hole could pass through the Proton without intersecting it’s center, and would be likely to do so [Saganvoice]Billions and Billions[/Saganvoice] of times before it absorbed even one massive particle which it “hit.” Of course a hit would require that it passed through the entire electon shell structure of the atom it was hitting, and that is much much larger than a proton.
That doesn’t even consider if such an event is possible without the collision energy provided in its creation. I have my doubts about that, too. This object is not a billiard ball, but an extremely small particle, Gravity is a weak force, and the forces affecting it would include others of much higher magnitude. (Is this a particle with a +2 electrical charge? I don’t know how to consider that anomaly.)
Many people have the idea that all and any black holes are dangerous. This is not true. Many people believe that all and any black holes are dangerous because they believe that black holes have infinite or superlarge gravitational forces. This is not true. As with all other things the force of gravity will depend only on it’s mass. A microscopic black hole will only have the force of gravity related to it’s mass. Although this will be larger than any ordinary (non-blackhole) particle of the same size, it doesn’t mean it will likely be so large as to cause danger. The LHC will not create largely massive black holes even if a black hole is inadvertently created.
I think the danger is that a black hole, regardless of how small, will consume whatever falls into its event horizon, getting bigger as it collected mass. Theoretically it would keep growing until it wasn’t microscopic anymore.
If the smallest massive particles are 10[sup]-8[/sup] times the size of the black hole, and the black hole has only twice the mass and charge of the particles that are “falling into” it, doesn’t the fact that the electric force is many orders of magnitude greater than the gravitational force mean that the black hole will be repelled by any nucleus it approaches by much greater force than the gravity effect it will have at atomic distances? I think that is the whole reason why you build LHC’s in the first place. What is going to force the black hole toward those nuclear particles?