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Concern Over Creating Black Holes
Maria Williams writes to tell us about worry surrounding the impending startup of CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Some fear that the device, in creating mini black holes, could jeopardize Life As We Know It. While the tiny black holes should evaporate quickly — throwing off so-called Hawking radiation that can be detected — CERN software developer Ran Livneh reminds us that "Any physicist will tell you that there is no way to prove that generated black holes will decay." The LHC site assures us there's nothing to worry about. The flap is reminiscent of the time the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider went live. The worry then was that "negative strangelets" could gobble up the world.
Thanks.
For those who don't know, in the John Titor story, the CERN LHC allegedly lays the groundwork for using artificial black holes as part of a time machine (made for the military by General Electric, of course!).
(And no, John Titor is not a real time traveler.)
For example:
Along with the prediction of World War III, another notable prediction is that of a Civil war in America, which was predicted to begin in 2004, around the time of the presidential election, and would escalate until 2008, which, according to Titor, "[is] a general date by which time everyone will realize the world they thought they were living in was over."
Even statements like this are subjective and many people still choose to believe; I'm sure there are many slashdot readers (judging from the kind of posts I see here) who believe we are currently in a nascent "civil war" and that, indeed, the "world they thought they were living in was over." This is all typical vague crap that can be viewed a variety of different ways, Nostradamus-style, and never soundly disproven, conspiracy-theory-style. Even now, people are arguing that John Titor's visit may have allowed us to "change our future". Yeah, because the mental giants who believe the John Titor story have had a huge impact on things.
...
It's quite impressive how many people actually believe this tripe, though.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
It's already begun!
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
I can't believe people are scared of being sucked into nothingness. What the fuck is wrong with them? Its just a black hole!!!!1
[/sarcasm]
As long as Gordon Freeman is there to watch over the experiment, I think we'll all be okay. Maybe.
I hear the Vortigaunts are our allies.
The worry then was that "negative strangelets" could gobble up the world.
You see, the problem is that we could all get sucked off before we know what's going on.
Summation 2
Seems to me that the only real problem with blowing this sort of thing off by saying "this is just like last time when we tried something that had a small chance of destroying the world and it worked out okay then" is that you really only have to be wrong once.
"Oh shit! Yeah, our bad -- man, are our faces red. Sorry about that, everybody."
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Well, it beats being hit by a bus....
Standing at the pearly gates it would be a great converstation starter... "oh yeah? I was killed by a black hole...."
....Hard On Collider? I think I'd prefer an earth swallowing black hole.
The black holes would only eat up Kurt Vonnegut. However, the efect would be the same as if they ate up the whole world, since it's all a figment of his imagination.
Bruce Perens.
Being cautious about a potentially real issue is one thing, but of course the big issue here is that collisions of similar energy happen, if not commonly, at least not entirely rarely due to cosmic rays. If the world could be destroyed by the side-effects of such a collision, we wouldn't be here to be nervous about it.
I've had this sig for three days.
Reminds of 'Thrice upon a Time', where receiving information from the future was creating micro-black holes, which then were causing detectable micro-damage elsewhere, IIRC.
Cool book, anyway.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Watch out if you let the Technocore help. Can we farcast off of Old Earth yet?
(see "Old Earth": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
another lame attempt to become popular... Everyone wants to be heard.. So if you cannot create the machine, be its number one troll. this will gain you equal fame.
Of course there's a way. Empirical research, just like they're doing. First you make a black hole, then you see if it expands until it destroys all life on earth. Simple, straight forwards, effective.
Where are they? Gone.
Civilizations routinely destroy their home planet by creating miniature black holes thereupon whilst trying to figure out what makes them tick. Technology advances faster than democracy, and it has never yet in the long history of the universe been put to a vote.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Some scientists were very concerned the first atomic bomb would produce so much heat it would ignite the atmosphere and burn the entire surface of the earth. Fortunately it didn't happen. But it's good that people bring up these ideas so we challenge assumptions and try to be safe while still advancing science.
Developers: We can use your help.
TMQ had it first!
This is the reason that the Earth entry was changed from "Harmless" to "Mostly harmless".
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Some fear that the device, in creating mini black holes, could jeopardize Life As We Know It.
I was worried that my poor highschool and early college grades, plus lack of practical experience in government would go against me. It's comforting there are people like that out there are people of the land, the common clay of the mankind, you know... morons.
Meanwhile, the warming of the earth in 50 years time, at the rate we're going is going to displace hundreds of millions, cause unimaginable famine and natural disaster, bring countless birds and animals which can't suddenly adapt to extinction and bring to an end life as we have known it. This might just be the solution to the Greenhouse problem...
if this thing starts a blackhole which ends up killing us all, I'm going to be really angry!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ethics are the philosopher's business. Science needn't worry about such things.
Considering the massive force of a black hole explosion (implosion, whatever), tinfoil is *not* going to be strong enough (sorry, saskboy). I'll stock up on the following items, courtesy of the Periodic Table Table entry for "Silver":
Silver-lined tinfoil hat, cleverly disguised as a normal trucker's hat.
Silver Boxer Shorts -- while all you smartie-pants rationalists are protecting your *brains*, I'll be protecting Man's truest contribution to the future of humanity.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
...Yet
This is exactly right. There is nothing to be concerned about here.
I would say the "The Lifeboat Foundation's" chances of building a self sustaining space colony by 2020 are about a quadrillion times greater than the chance of a man-made mini-black hole eating us all.
Edward Teller speculated that an atomic weapon could ignite the atmosphere. Another physicist discredited and disproved the idea, but the fear wasn't laid to rest until the actual weapons were used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project (wikipedia, blah blah blah)
Cthulhu Saves.
Welcome our new world devouring overlords.
While the tiny black holes should evaporate quickly...
The biggest word in that sentence is should.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I can get my Sphere of Annihilation! Do you have any idea how hard it is to find these items? Damn liches seem to have a monopoly on them.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Here we go again! People, people, people... if this was going to happen it already would have happened. The univese has been bombarding the Earth with much higher energy particles since the beginning (cosmic rays) and the Earth is still here and a bunch of debris in an acretion ring about a black hole.
Dr. Frank J. Nagy Fermilab Computing Division Authentication and Directory Services Group
Primary cosmic rays impact the earth all the time, and these often have far higher energies than even our largest particle accelerators are capable of producing. For any experiment we attempt, we can be reasonably sure that colliding cosmic rays have already produced the same results, sometime within the past few billions years. If we could create massively destructive black holes through our particle accelerators, one would expect that stray cosmic rays would have already done so.
It's already begun!
Don't worry about it. 3 billion years from now and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) will be ripping this place to bits.
there's also the Great Attractor, so we're all doomed eventually anyway.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
has definitely taken over Slashdot As We Know It.
It's natural to fear what you don't understand. It might even be a quality of a species that determines its success as many things in nature are quite dangerous. For better or for worse, mankind has this built in as a default setting no matter who you are whether you're fearing a black hole or suffering from xenophobia.
I am not a physicist but I think the fears here are quite unfounded. All the math and theory point to a black hole having a finite event horizon. If the black holes they are producing are microscopic and last relatively little amount of time, they shouldn't be very dangerous. I think this has been covered before.
It is interesting though, because I believe a black hole's event horizon has a radius proportionate to the amount of mass it consumes. I believe that if you make them small enough, however, they don't last long enough to expand. I would be concerned if they were attempting to make massive singularities to destroy garbage heaps with these but I don't see how those would be possible to create as the only known method is to accumulate so much mass in such a small volume that gravity crushes it into a singularity. My understanding of the collider is that it smashes particles together at a fast rate and, as a result, very tiny and brief black holes may result. As this article states:
People will, as always, fear what they don't understand so I believe it's hopeless to quell all fears about physics research. I'm sure a lot of people are concerned about this being the next "atomic bomb" technology. Where we "drop" black holes on enemies. Though that doesn't really make sense, it still could have military applications such as creating electromagnetic devices that are so strong they displace gravity and aiming them at your enemies. Sure would make for a cheesy sci-fi book whether it was true or not!
My work here is dung.
Is CERN trying to copy b movies
http://www.scifi.com/blackhole/
If I get some mod points, and Arthur lets me, I will remember to come back and mod you down.
- Gage Blackwood
Agent 5 of the Temporal Security Agency
This type of fear occurred many times during the nuclear physics history, when higher and higher energies were explored. The answer against fears of unknown catastrophic effect has been that some cosmic rays are much more energetic than any artificially accelerated particles (10^21 eV for some cosmic rays in comparison to the feeble 10^12 eV in today accelerators such as LHC). For sure the Earth and the Sun did already receive zillons of cosmic rays without disappearing...
For example, there are as yet little-understood phenomena that can accelerate particles six orders of magnitude faster than anything achievable in a lab. Try reading about Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
More specifically read the story of the Oh-My-God Particle. This was a proton detected in October of 1991 that had an energy of 3.2 * 10^20 eV. The equivalent energy of a baseball thrown at 55 mph... all in a single proton travelling at 99.99999999999999999999951% the speed of light!
While something travelling that fast has little probability of interacting with anything you could imagine the surprise if one of those hit you! I think that the fact we are alive with such powerful forces already at work in our universe means we have little to fear.
is my honest answer. between the impending floods as the ice melts (notice that the new trans american union hiway runs along the projected coast line), the wars the us starts (hey lets nuke iran for the elections), the insane ppl with bio weapons, something will kill the planet off soon enough.
and if we make it to 2012, it all blows up anyway.
color me pessimistically unimpressed
-.no
Finally! something a tinfoil hat will protect against!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Could it be that black-holes, super-nova, and dark matter could be the result of some tech going horribly wrong ??
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
I work one of the LHC expirements (low-level grad student, no one important), and this is utter crap.
Yes, there are physicists who are concerned. There is a chance that this could happen - one of those "if everything we know about high energy physics is completely wrong, this could happen". There is an approximately equal chance that Pat Buchanan will be nominated as the Democrat candidate for president in 2008. No physicist can prove that this won't happen - just like no physicist can actually prove that Superman doesn't exist.
Unfortunately, it's about the only way a reporter can "sexy up" a story about a particle accelerator. I can't wait to see the headlines in 2007 - "Will the Earth end tomorrow?" (subheading: "Respectable scientists say 'No'").
it can be contained somehow and then be used for disposing trash.
Our government already knows how to create a black hole that threatens life as we know it. It's called the United States Budget Deficit.
So what you're saying is, at the Large Hadron Collider safety is not guaranteed.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
didnt they say the same thing when some scientists were trying to create a mini- big bang in the lab? well, the universe appears to be unaffected...
What will happen?
We'll all die. Simultaneously. Noone will feel anything.
What's the big problem aside from the end of the earth?
Hey, there are worse fates than being sucked into a black hole. Might clean things up in the world!
Then again, those who believe this should join the tin-hat club...
I knew a couple of negative strangelets a few years back. They wear some bad dudes. They kept eating all my stuff. So I hooked up with a positive normlet and she really took care of those guys!
Suck a lemon?
"Has anyone seen my car keys? I set them right next to the collider."
This reminds when I read Brian Greene's Elegant Universe, he mentioned that there was a possibilty of creating another Universe when (if it were possible) smashing together Superstrings. Something like that, I'm not sure where I put the book.
Larry Niven won a Hugo for his story about a tiny black hole used (allegedly) as a murder weapon and later consuming Mars.
"The math is chancy..."
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
That at the time of the Manhattan Project, some people were afraid that detonating a nuclear bomb would start a chain reaction that would burn off the Earth's atmosphere.
That was ridiculous too.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
More like, "o..."
Actually, the civil war prediction is pretty clear-cut. Do we have two or more large factions of Americans shooting each other for political purposes? No. Therefore, while the country is certainly polarized, we aren't in a civil war.
The line may be fuzzy -- people are still arguing over whether Iraq is in a civil war, but they're shooting at each other (and us). So far, though, the USA is clearly on the negative side of that line.
The American civil war is generally agreed to have begin with the firing on Fort Sumter, not with the polarization of the country or even with the first states to secede from the Union.
...and plenty of dark matter.
before the big asteroid or comet comes. Or the sun goes red giant. Or the sun shoots off enough matter to defeat the ozone and expose us all to radiation. (Yes, I have heard this one.) Oh, or Yellowstone goes all explosion on us and brings about a second ice age or something. (There was a Docu-drama on this one.) Oh, or maybe the moon can be partially destroyed and threaten to crash into earth. (Reference to a ABC Family comedy or in some ways to Cowboy Bebop). Oh, or nuclear winter. I am sure I forgot some.
But better us then nature!
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Ok, so as long as this remains theoretical we don't know for certain. But, this is unlikely, very unlikely. We should first look at empirical evidence - Collisions with energies of this magnitude happen in space all the time from natural sources (solar radiation etc), and yet cause us no ill effect. So its clear that such an event occurring is very unlikely. Its good that we consider such possibilities, but I'm sure that the probabilities are tiny, one in several billion perhaps. I would consider this to be an acceptable margin to perform an experiment that could destroy the earth, especially one from which we can learn so much.
These people watch too many movies.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
Come on, I thought we are atheists here at /. . At least note that it's "mythical".
If one MUST be created, do it in Redmond, Washington.
According to this New Scientist article you can get odds of 6-1 that the Large Hadron Collider will find the Higgs before 2010 at 6-1. Sounds like a dead cert to me.
The reason several billion dollars are going into the electromagnetic crop circle known as the Large Hadron Collider is to detect the Higgs particle. The standard model of physics predicts all the detected particles we have seen out there. The model can be represented by the symmetry groups U(1) for EM, SU(2) for the weak force, and SU(3) for the strong force. Well, it can do that so long as none of the none forces has a mass. Oops, that's not what the experimentalist tell us.
So what do theoretical physicists do? They try to sneak in something without breaking it. That is what is known as Higgs mechanism, or the false vacuum Mexican hat dance. Instead of saying the vacuum is a vacuum is the home field of zero, it is claimed that vacuum is utterly false, there is a Higgs field everywhere there can be a where, so that fundamental particles can get some mass when they need it (always). This mathematical trick works because it doesn't mess up the symmetry in the Lagrangian (a fancy way of writing all the interactions that can happen in a volume), but does get the vacuum to add the mass back in.
You may have noticed gravity is not in the standard model. Guess what is going to happen when gravity gets in? Gravity will break the nice symmetry, and no Higgs boson will be needed.
The uber-sophisticated will complain (whine) that gravity is done by a spin 2 particle, but the Higgs is all about inertia, so it must be spin 0. This is not a flaw, it is a sign from Einstein, specifically the equivalence principle that gravitational mass (the spin 2 thing) must be cow-tied to inertial pass (the spin 0 thing). There is no way to wrestle a steer to the ground unless those two are expressions of one and the same thing.
The way I do it, because of course I have my own personal unified field theory, is to use a second rank symmetric field strength tensor for gravity and the spin 2 stuff, and then use the trace of that very same tensor for the spin 0 Higgslike stuff.
Blowing sophisticated bubbles out my butt,
doug
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
If "multiple" tiny black holes are being created, and they combine, don't we
get a "less tiny" black hole?
And isn't that... "bad"?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
If a black hole is created and remains stable anywhere on earth, you won't even have time to scream "Oh, shit!" before your molecular structure is torn apart.
So, no sense in worrying about an event that you will not notice is happening and will never be able to remember.
Langoliers anyone?
People get worked up over a remote chance of a theoretical event when a new collider is built... yet McDonald's opens 500 "restaurants" a year and nobody worries about the end of life as we know it.
- White Knight of the Order of Mihoshi Enthusiasts
Did they split gravitons or create black holes and die?
While this is really cool, I think that "Faster than Light Propulsion" should be the priority for all physicists
Ladies and Gentlement, the President of the United States: "These so-called scientists have gone too far this time. While we do not know for sure one way or another what the results of these experiments will be in the future, we cannot wait for the possibility that a black hole could destroy our way of life as we know it, disrupt our focus on the real enemy--global terror networks. Or even worse, reduce corporate profits. That is why I have ordered our armed forces into harm's way once again. As we speak, nucular physicists worldwide are being brought to justice by our brave men and women in uniform. They--these rogues--are not scientists, they are illegal combatants, and we will have no mercy on those who cannot justify their expensive research. This could be 9/11, all over again, only on an unprecedented scale that we cannot even imagine. That is all."
Join the window installer's union, where prosperity is a brick throw away!
To make it safe, just in case, they should put a cement or metal container around it. Outside the event horizon somehow.
Knowing the government and their previous actions on subjects like this I think they have already experimented with the mini black holes. Most scientific information that would give the general public a stir is withheld for many years until the people are ready. I believe that black holes are not time traveling devices, but more of a door to a new universe. Black holes suck in anything and everything, including light. Our universe started from a Singularity in which matter was infinitely compressed and space and time was infinitely distorted. Black holes compress and distort matter and time. Put two and two together and what do you have? The birth of our universe. I believe our universe was born inside of a black hole and that we are currently living and evolving inside of it. Thus means every black hole we see out in space possibly is a gateway to another universe. Tell me what you think?
The fans of Scary Movie 4? A Viagra-induced massive hardon and a cat makes a black hole a very insignificant problem.
.. they flip the switch, its all good.
..
I mean, that should be enough time to do all the things I always wanted to do when/if I knew the world was going to end
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It will not start a chain reaction in the water, converting it all to gas and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity.
... my computer has created mini black holes all the time i can't tell the number of times i have seen the "Divied by zero" error. Damn old dos programs.
working in a small cubicle, doing nothing that will ever even change the world, while these guys are working on a project that could destroy the world! I'm so jealous... I've made bad choices.
But I think their understanding of Trek warp theory is way off. Enterprise zips around the galaxy without time dilation effects.
Seriously, how many times did the submitter have to rewrite that until he got "Large Hadron Collider" to come out? Also, google for "hardon particle". It's puerile, yes, but amusing enough before lunch hour.
OMG the sky is falling!!! Oh wait false alarm, my minute of fame is over. Next....
...that the world won't end as a result of this experiment. Any takers?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
According to this safety report(PDF), commissioned by CERN, there is no perceivable threat.
I read it here, and a few posts above you.
If a blackhole is created and doesn't dissipate don't worry about it. There won't be time to stress out. It will gobble up everything so quickly you won't know what happen. Then life (beyond the earth anyhow) moves on. :)
That'll prevent black holes from appearing, at least in the US.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Interestingly, created black holes destroying the world is part of the plot of this book.
And yes, I'd like my karma points.
... they were worried about. The kind you need another fission bomb just to ignite. I did remove an entire island from the face of the earth.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
If we can (barely) survive Jim Goatse, I'm sure we can survive anything.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
-Picture the DMV times a billion or so.
-Think of what the waiting room would smell like after a while.
-And it's run by near-sighted 90-year-old volunteers, hope they don't make a mistake processing your paperwork!
Somehow along the way I made a bad choice in life and now must live with 0 Karma.
I just hope they don't produce more Ridiculons. If you ask me, we got enough of them already...
Is anyone else concerned that we are creating a black hole on our planet? I mean sure they say we can control it, but what happens if we can't, or something goes wrong? Then we have to problem on this balck hole eating everything in it's path. I'm no physist, or anything like that, but I do know that messing with black holes on the one inhabitable planet we know of is probably not the greatest idea. Just in my opinion, I understand the scientific research and how advanced this is, but something is unsound here.
N. A. Stuart
So we might loose France and Switzerland? What's the problem here?
(j/k) :)
I don't know how old Hogan's book is, but in 1990 or so David Brin wrote
Earth
where an artificial black hole grows out of control and slowly eats the planet earth from the inside out.
Damn, you beat me to it. That's exactly right, and so true it really is funny (and so funny it HAS to be true).
Intelligent life is EXTREMELY common, and every time it arises in the universe it starts toying with the fundamental forces of nature, builds particle accelerators and voila.... soon we have a universe populated by blackholes, the vast majority of which represent the former locations of intelligent life forms....
It's really quite a profound thought/possibility... intelligence as a thing that is its own undoing in a deep sense. It's the oldest mythological idea around..... wouldn't it be funny if it was real by THIS mechanism?
Well, we wouldn't have time to laugh since the black hole would suck everything in pretty quickly... but if we did have time to laugh surely the intense irony of that "I'm falling into a black hole" moment would be bring a good chuckle!
We're messing around with black holes and we don't even have an operational Hawking drive yet? I don't know about you, but I really don't trust the TechnoCore all that much.
There's an old Sci-Fi novel, The Krone Experiment, which has exactly this idea as a premise. Although now I've gone and given away the "big surprise" of the book, it's still well worth a read: it's a gripping good yarn that lays out the purported consequences of releasing a microscopic black hole on Earth. I think it's out of print though -- I got a used copy from Amazon for less than $5.
Thats Fermi's Paradox!:
h tml
"The story goes that, one day back on the 1940's, a group of atomic scientists, including the famous Enrico Fermi, were sitting around talking, when the subject turned to extraterrestrial life. Fermi is supposed to have then asked, "So? Where is everybody?" What he meant was: If there are all these billions of planets in the universe that are capable of supporting life, and millions of intelligent species out there, then how come none has visited earth? This has come to be known as The Fermi Paradox.
Fermi realized that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly colonize the entire Galaxy. Within a few million years, every star system could be brought under the wing of empire. A few million years may sound long, but in fact it's quite short compared with the age of the Galaxy, which is roughly ten thousand million years. Colonization of the Milky Way should be a quick exercise."
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/cosmo/lectures/lec28.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Is anyone at the "LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION" even a physicist?
I saw biologists, doctors, writers, sociologists, computer scientist/mathmatician, but no physicist.
What makes this group of people qualified to even talk about this project? Imagine the uproar if a physicist said "We should not perform this medical procedure because it could be dangerous."
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Step 1. Create miniature momentary black hole
Step 2. Patent black holes
Step 3. Profit!
If this collider thingy can create black holes, doesn't that mean that cosmic rays have already been doing it for billions of years?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Look people. If we create something in lab that sucks the earth into a blackhole or ignites the atmosphere with an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction... We won't be around to notice the event.
Therefore, there are two universes. In one, the event kill us all, and in the other the event fails to do so.
It is as simple as that.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The real civil war that will take place in this country won't be of the body, it will be of the mind... as more and more mind control pressure is pressed on the people, an enevitable backlash is going to occur in such a way that even the ideot class won't buy it anymore. We educated elite will soon find that our ignorant redneck and our savage thuglife bretherin will be our greatest friends in the war on the aristocracy. They want enlightenment just as much as we do. they just havn't been shown how to get it; fortunatly they are all armed, and when the revolution comes it will be us they turn to us to rebuild
Ob Lexx reference:
)
Actually, I'm *a lot* more worried about measuring the mass of the Higgs Boson than I am about black holes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson_(fiction
In Soviet Russia in such cases we just used to spit 3 times over the left shoulder and go ahead. Worked well for nuclear stations.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
We should have plenty of time to laugh at the irony thanks to time dilation. The first thing you'll notice is that all of the clocks set via GPS will display the wrong time, depending on your prospective.
It's not like there'll be anyone left to apologise to...
People with a fear of the unknown have long been known for predicting things that never came true. My favorite was that trains would go fast enough that people riding on them would not be able to breathe. However, for ending the world, there are all sorts of ones too. Such as an atmospheric detonation of a nuclear device setting the atmosphere on fire, creating a chain reaction that would destroy all life. This is just another in a long line of fears that hold back progress because people are inherently resistant to change.
Learn to love Alaska
Reminds me of the boot Thrice Upon a Time by James P. Hogan where one of the scenarios is the world is destroyed by a CERN fusion generators that uses inertial confinement and ends up producing mini black holes as a byproduct.
All the micro-blackholes should evaporate but won't they leave a bunch of naked singularites floating around? What will all these singularities do to the earth?
But since the 1920s the kinds of guns that are legal for American citizens to own haven't had a chance of impacting the outcome of any real war.
In the case of a war against (or involving) the US military, you're of course correct. But if (as the thread mentions) we were talking about a "civil" war, in the sense of opposing sectors of the general population slugging it out, then believe me that a nice deer rifle will make you plenty dead. Now, it's a little hard to imagine such a conflict since, despite the rabid, rancorous divide over some policy issues, there aren't too many things that would have the people in, say, Pennsylvania, deciding that it's time to head a few miles south and wipe out the population of a town in northern Maryland. Of course, the people from PA would win, since the people in MD would still be fumbling with their mandated trigger locks.
The only thing that I think could possibly turn that ugly would be, say, a seriously inflammatory immigration incident, or perhaps some unthinkably ugly thing involving Dearborn, Michigan. Who knows. But the north vs. south type just isn't going to find some modern equivalent in "red" vs. "blue." In the more commonly fantasized uprising sort of action, you're completely correct that the military (or even just the Guard in one state) would be way too much for your average gun owner to face. Yes, I know Red Dawn was a documentary, but we repelled that invasion already. I'm waiting for the sequel: Refried Bean Dawn.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Black holes suck up matter around them, and then emit pure energy. This would allow us to effectively use the nearly limitless energy around us. However, the big oil cartel doesn't want to allow it. So, they are sponsoring the luddite movement to stop it.
It seems like I read a book with this as a basis when I was young. Really. I was in my early teens, so I didn't understand the science of any of this (still don't in fact), but if I recall correctly, people could purchase personal worm-hole creators. The problem came when one got too large. . . .
Anyway, James Hogan's book is from 1980.
And the idea of human experimental contraptions disrupting the fabric of our known universe is also present in Haldeman's "The Coming" . Could be a common theme actually.
It's unlikely to destroy the earth, but even if there's a good chance it will: Do it anyway.
Live a little..
Perhaps many of the black holes in the universe are the remnants of higher life forms, from which we will never hear? ;-)
If you really want to put all of us in danger, try harder. Like these guys at www.worldjumpday.org who want to shift earth from its orbit by jumping all at once!
... I for one welcome our Large Hadron Overlords ...
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
Ya know, for a story about the possible destruction of the world, there certainly are a lot of jokesters around here. I can't recall any /. story in recent memory (unless it's something about Jack Thompson or MS placing a patent on breathing) that had so many Score:5 Funny posts as todays.
The scientists bet on whether it would ignite the atmosphere and scorch the Earth. Sounds like the same kind of thing to me.
Yeah! Fuck the power! ...
I dunno. I think somone's seen 'Fight Club' one too many times.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Yeah, what he said. As long as the guys running the experiments don't cross the streams, everything will be fine.
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
So what?
:-p
Most people believe in an afterlife. If this destroys everything, those people will just get there faster. Some people don't believe in an afterlife. Well, they know that they're going to die some day regardless, so sooner rather then later won't make a difference.
Mike Scanlon
Cosmologists making them is great. Ill worry when cosmetiscists are catching up.
There is some controversy over whether Hawking radiation actually exists. And it wouldn't invalidate 'everything we know about particle physics and gravitation' if it didn't exist.
There are several cosmological models where mini-black holes exist and Hawking radiation doesn't, including some which posit mini-black holes as the solution to some of the dark matter problem
If this sort of thing really could happen we would have already seen cosmic rays make a blac hole and swallow things up somewhere in our solar system.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
IANAP, but when this came up before the best explanation I heard that Life As We Know It killing black holes would not be produced is because Nature is already doing this. Cosmic rays strike the earth's atmosphere with more energy than the large hadron collider will produce.
r / This is indeed mentioned in the LHC article on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider #Safety_concerns/
Examining wikipedia I see that cosmic rays have energies up to 10^20 ev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray/ while the large hadron collider will have energies up to 10^14 ev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collide
So any particles that LHC is liable to produce are already being made in our upper atmosphere right now. The question is what's the difference (if any) between these particles and those the LHC may produce? I can only think of one... momentum... any mini-black holes made by cosmic rays will be on a trajectory that will take them through the earth and out the otherside (if they live long enough), while those produced in the LHC may be essentially motionless. Is this a significant difference?
Alternatively, I do not believe that Hawking radiation has been detected from cosmic ray black-hole creation, lending more support to the belief that the LHC can't produce them either.
IMHO, we're safe, not because theory gives it a very very low probability, but because the reality of cosmic ray energy hasn't killed us yet.
It'll say "earth WILL end tomorrow" (subheading: "many scientists agree")
but this gives me an idea for making money... I'll sell t-shirts that say "I survived the armageddon - and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
See Doomsday Fears at RHIC in particular the reference Review of Speculative "Disaster Scenarios" at RHIC
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
There is an assumption in all of this, that the singularity is a point in space/time. This is how it is normally considered, but it is by no means the only interpretation that would be valid. Evaporation only applies within this assumption because entropy can only ever increase and the entropy of a physical point singularity that did not evaporate would be a constant. If a singularity does not exist as a point (there are other solutions, such as a "Kerr Ring Singularity") or doesn't actually exist as a physical entity at all (see below for a trivial theory where that would work), then all bets are off.
This is a "just for amusement" theory, for the sole purpose of illustrating a singularity that would not violate the second law of thermodynamics and still not evaporate. Let us say that a singularity does have infinite gravity at the point at which it "exists", and that the curvature of space/time is a direct function of gravity, then what we call a singularity would not actually exist as an object. At all. What you would have is a "well" of essentially zero diameter where the sides were orthogonal to space and along the axis of time in a negative direction. The notion that "space and time end at a singularity" would not be true to an observer within the Universe, as they would not experience the well as anything other than a continuation of space. However, space would then not be simply-connected and it would be mathematically possible to show that there were mathematically definable points within an otherwise well-defined region that could not be reached.
Now for the well itself. It cannot stop within the universe, because there are no forces along that axis. F=ma, so if F=0, then a=0. Nor can it continue forever, because it's going along the axis of time and time does not continue forever. There is exactly one place such a well could terminate, that being the moment of the Big Bang. (It stops there because there's nothing more to travel along.) It would be an express trip, there would be no possibility of getting off anywhere else. So it's just as well that, if this correct, anything that fell in would be crushed into quantum foam. Nothing else is going to fit in a well of zero diameter. Hawking's theory of imaginary time becoming real time would certainly fit this description.
This theory would require that (a) black holes can only ever expand, (b) hawking radiation would contain equal numbers of particles and anti-particles (which would explain why we have such trouble finding any), (c) the recently-proved Poincare hypothesis does NOT apply to space/time, as it is no longer simply-connected, and therefore the Universe is NOT topologically equivalent to a hypersphere (which is going to upset the Chinese and Russians no end), and (d) the Hubble constant absolutely must be below 1.
(That last one might not be obvious, so I'll explain. This theory recycles matter and energy through time to the big bang. Since you have a Universe's worth of matter/energy, you would not need inflation theory - which is "good" because inflation is an ugly hack whose chief benefit is that it works vastly better than every other mainstream theory in existance. But you can't guarantee that the whole Universe is recycled if the Universe is open. You can only guarantee 100% recycling if every possible photon and every possible particle is absolutely
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Only on slashdot will you find someone offering a serious rebuttal to the "three stooges theory of particle physics". God help us.
Actually, I'e never seen Fight Club. I don't really watch movies or television. I spend most of my time writing music, or playing games, or checking up on my family thru their internet blogs. Otherwise, I just read about stuff thru my email, and I take most of it with a grain of salt.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...but I know for a fact that I once met and dated a negative stranglet back in the 70s and DO WE HAVE WORLD PEACE YET? FLYING CARS???
I THINK NOT!
I rest my case..some things are better left *unknown*
The good news is that if they're wrong, nobody will be angry at them!
Nathan Friedly
That's the book I was thinking about, but you are wrong about the "time machine" causing the black holes, it was an expermintal fusion plant that was creating the micro-black holes, and was causing interference with the time machine, so they had to send a message back in time to stop the plant from going online, without having a chance to figure out what would happen to them by sending the message.
I don't think the black holes were causing interference to the machine but they were orbiting at high velocities and low enough to damage things and people by putting holes in them. I do remember that they had to send a message back in time to prevent the black holes from destroying the Earth. In the story once the micro black holes got going nothing could stop them. Interesting book and funny that about three fourths of the story never happened at the end of it all, since every message sent back changed the future.
What makes me worry is the fact that we (humans) all through history thought we "knew" things that turned out to be completely wrong. We once thought all matter consists off the elements Fire, Water, Air and Earth. We once thought the earth was a disc. We once thought the earth was the center of the universe. We once thought time was constant...
In the past our new discoveries led to scientific advancement instead of utter destruction - the thing that has changed since then is the fact that we really are playing with enormously powerful 'toys' now - never in our history have we harnessed the energy of nuclear fission, could we accelerate particles to near light speed etc.
I crave innovation and scientific advancement just like any geek, but we should always be aware of (I know it sounds cliche) the "Ooh, this wasn't supposed to happen" scenario and act accordingly (which in certain cases will mean NOT to step foward, but to take a step back and reevaluate). There may not be a Neo, Gordon Freeman or a Spider Man to save humanity.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Back then, the "republican" conservatives opposed the expansion of slavery and made freeing the slaves a goal. I believe they actually won the election before the civil war. Techically, Lincoln started out as a "whig", although by then the whig party was split along pro-slave/anti-slave lines and most of the anti-slave whigs (including Lincoln) became republicans by the time of the election.
Often, the pro-slave ex-whigs called themselves the "conservatives" (in an attempt to reconcile the whig party), but they mostly just teamed up with the democrats in the south and of course the democrats lost that antebellum election and the conservative "republicans" won.
Perhaps you can make the case that technically the north-conservatives won and the south-conservatives lost, but I don't think that makes your case...
Fight Club is about consumerism, not government corruption. And even the movie itself acknowledges the hypocrisy of the methods used by Tyler and his "soldiers."
Not that that necessarily invalidates what you said, though.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
is here Contrary Brin.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Uh, how much gravitational power does it take to overwhelm atomic repulsion? And how much mass does THAT take? Until they can fit Jupiter on the head of a pin, they aren't making a black hole. We aren't even close to cramming a hill onto the head of a pin, much less a mountain. Fearing a black hole of doom from any machine that isn't cosmic in scale is just silly. They're just making a really, REALLY large atom, which I'd call "footballium". I'd be more worried if the reaction goes fusion, because that could make a nice sized crater.
Every black hole in existence in the universe is a result of some fairly advanced civilization reaching a point where each eventually says "Hey, let's build a Large Hadron Collider and see what happens".
The rest, as they say, is astronomical history....
Can you post an entry on your blog about what happens when the Secret Service turn up? I've always wondered.
(I don't think Old Man Murray told the truth in their report.)
Why does this keep coming up? Natural ultra-high energy (UHE) cosmic rays have vastly higher energies and do no such thing. The highest-energy cosmic ray recorded is 300 EeV (that's exaelectron-volts -- 3 x 1020 eV. We get showered by these cosmic rays all the time; if high-energy particle collisions were going to make miniature black holes which somehow don't evaporate and kill us all, then it would have happened long before the Earth finished forming.
There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Looking back in retrospect, it is interesting to see what he thought of as important at the time. It was, in fact, largely the problems that were considered politically important at the time. Now, not so much. He talked about mad cow, the 2000 elections and the partisanship they caused (leading to a civil war), and Waco. None of these are issues even today, never mind in 30 years or whatever. If I were to write something today about how important 9/11 will be in 30 years, I think I will look foolish within 5 years. I doubt we'll care much about 9/11 after... oh wait, I've said too much.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
For the black-hole-fearing crowd... RIAA/MPAA morphed into a black hole a long time ago.
Each will crush the other into a single singularity again.
How do you clean up a black hole? With another black hole of course! No muss, no fuss.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
If not then I might go on with my life and not to bother with this.
If he is worried then I guess I should stop saving for my retirement fund.
Failure, Mr. Jones, is hardly original.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
But, wouldnt each particle that gets absorbed increase the size of the blackhole, causing it to be more powerful and suck in even more?
Sure it might take thousands of years, but i dont see it not being a threat at all.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Far worse things could happen. For example we might find that the local vacuum state is just a local minimum and that there is, in fact, a lower energy state, if you can just push the vacuum over the edge of its potential well. Who knows, a few trillion eV might be enough to do that. The next effect would be that space itself would start dropping down to a lower energy level and the effect would probably spread out at the speed of light turning the entire universe into a vast ball of energy of <> proportions.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
One civilization has to be the first. Maybe we're it.
I have a reputation as a pontificating waffler to maintain, y'know. :) (And the answer is indeed "yes".)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You're perfectly correct, but I was hoping to sell some of the doom-sayers a Black Hole Escape Kit.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If we can hold off on calculating the mass of a bozon partical till 2019 then I can get myself a blackhole gun, Alright!
"All those, moments will be lost, in time, like tears, in rain. Time to die." Roy Batty
Conservation of mass, people. Unless that sucker has a HELL of a lot of mass, we have nothing to worry about. How
easy can it get?
I seem to remember a challenger disaster report that stated that many NASA managers were using similar logic to predict how likely it was for certain failures to cause a launch disaster when signing engineering waivers. They basically stated it was very unlikely for the shuttle to explode and we should first look at emperical evidence: shuttles were launched many times without an explosion, so it must be very unlikely. Certainly, NASA engineers kept considering such possibilites, but they all estimated the probabilities to be tiny and antecdotally considered them to be an acceptable margin to continue to launch.
Actually in the aftermath when they coalated the estimated number using more rigorous methodologies to determine mean-time before failure, they got much more pessimistic results than the "off-the-cuff" analysis made by the NASA managers. I'm always suspicious when people talk about probablities, and don't use real established procedures for determining risk. Of course, hind-sight is twenty-twenty, but it's always good to know the number when making a decision rather than use numbers to justify a pre-ordained decision.
Some people listen to too much manager-speak.
Word for word? Talk about /. groupthink. Yeesh. Oh and I'm first and get modded down; meanwhile you post the exact same thing and get modded up. OK.
Hey, I took acid, and I'm still here, right? right? aren't I? WTF?
This is scary - what if the terrorists get hold of one of these particle accelerators and make a black hole and destroy the earth? We need to act quickly! We need to have mandatory strip searches at every airport to make sure nobody is concealing a black hole in their PANTS (Particle Accelerator Neutral Transportation System)
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
What the people who are worried about this don't realize is that particles with over 8 orders of magnitude more energy than this have been striking the Earth for billions of years. If these sort of collisions could destroy the Earth, it would have been gone a long time ago.
what sig?
Would it be possible to use one of those black holes to swallow up some of that nuclear waste, rather than wait 10,000 years for the stuff to decay?
One civilization has to be the first. Maybe we're it.
Or maybe we live in the intergalactic equilivent of an anthill located in a park of a big city. We're completely surrounded by civilization, but totally oblivious to it.
The remaining six paragraphs (!) are not even wrong. You're not a physicist, are you?
The point of gravity is not to do work. If the Universe was completely empty, then to measure the distance between a pair of events would require this metric:
dtau^2 = 1^2dt^2 - 1^2/c^2(dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2)
Why include the 1^2? It is to emphasize that they are constants, the same for everyone, no matter where they are in the Universe. Yet there is nothing else in the Universe to check on it. Add a blob into the Universe, and those constants no longer work. They are very good. Only nerds with telescopes and atomic clocks could tell it was a wee bit different from one.
General relativity has a way to determine the functions that take the place of the 1^2. They start with a connection, which has three derivatives of a metric. Then they work with the Riemann curvature tensor, which is the divergence of two connections. This means now there is a second derivative of a metric. It is the second derivative of a metric that leads to an equation that can be solved. The problem with GR in my opinion is that one has to compare 2 paths, and that breaks the math machinery of quantum mechanics.
I take a different approach. Gravity is about doing nothing. Once there is something else in the Universe, you must do something, but the very least amount of something possible. That has a name: a simple harmonic oscillator, better known as a slinky. The math gets a little scary because it is a 4D slinky, with two modes for EM (the transverse ones) and two modes for gravity. Still, one is trying to do close to nothing, and that is a slinky.
One gets into 4D kinky slinky physics with a 4D wave equation. That itself has two covariant derivatives. If you look at two convariant derivatives acting one after the other, the trained eye can spot a second order derivative of a metric. That leads to a differential equation that can be solved to yield a metric.
The metric from my work ain't the one for GR (the Schwarzschild solution), it is prettier. Beauty always wins in physics, just like in the movies. It has exponentials in the place of the 1^2, and exponential appear again and again in physics. Why? Well when the exponent is super small, as it is for gravitational systems, it basically is 1. Only the first, and sometimes second terms matter. Those terms are identical for the exponential metric and GR. At second order parametrized Post Newtonian accuracy, the metrics are different, so unlike silly string theory, the proposal can be accepted or rejected based on an experiment.
Gravity is the least you can do because there is other crap in the Universe.
doug
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
Very high energy cosmic rays do this often in our atmosphere. I would have thought that if it was that dangerous we wouldn't be here to argue about it.
Bitter and proud of it.
...what if the heat generated by the detonation of atomic weaponry is a contributing factor to global warming? The atmosphere would trap the heat, and it'd take a long, long time for it to dissipate. Normally Earth has the atmosphere to protect us from the gamma radiation of space. It can't very well do that if you do that at the bottom of the atmosphere, in the troposphere, can it?
I think there should be a scientific study into how much the atomic weapon detonation has contributed to global warming, alongside all the other causes. I'm a frequent reader of LiveScience, and I don't think there's been one yet?
Thank you. Good night.
Esta es una firma en Espanol.
First of all, if it would lead to inventing a time machine, someone would come from the future and tell us not to worry because it all works out. The fact that nobody did means it's going to suck up the entire world. Oh wait, I forgot, backwards time travel doesn't exist because time is a human created concept and is just an effect on matter like temperature and you can't travel back in temperature either. Other than that ridiculous assertion, there's NO SPECIFIC POINT to this experiment. It's not going to pop out a cure for aids, it just might lead to something kinda cool but maybe not. That's not worth risking the entire planet and everyone on it for. In fact, nothing is. I saw we let Iran finish a nuke then we steal it and drop it on the control center so we can kill two birds with one stone.
now stop reading and go play Dance Dance Revolution!
one way or another.
As technology improves, each person has more available that can affect the world. 200 years ago, not even a government could really affect the world itself. Then bigger and bigger bombs arrived, first only controlled by governments, but now even individuals can create bombs that will destroy a neighborhood or even potentially a city.
Government has the ability to destroy the human race by using virii, and someday soon individuals will be able to do so.
People can fly planes into buildings. What happens when people can fly spaceships into cities? Dropping a big enough rock from space would do it pretty easily.
At some point, individuals will have enough personal power to fuck the rest of us up.
I kind of wish they would get on with it already.
Now, I'm not saying that the superhero movies, comic books, novels, novellas, and plot cliches had it right... it would just seem to me, if you're going to make something as potentially dangerous, destructive, and nifty, as a black hole... you should work on how to UNmake it first.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I'm commenting late and this will probably not be seen with 200+ comments already here, but I think it is important to clear up one fact:
According to our current understanding of physics, THE LHC WILL NOT MAKE BLACK HOLES!
Not Mini black holes, not Macro black holes, not Fuzzy black holes, no black holes of any kind.
The only theories that predict that it could happen are speculative musings about how physics might turn out to be if our current theories were all wrong. Maybe there are extra dimensions and gravity reacts specially with these extra dimensions. There is ZERO evidence for this, and if one of these theories turned out to be true it would be one of the most astonishing discoveries in the history of physics, right up there with the discovery of QM or relativity.
So at this point, the odds have to be said to be overwhelmingly against the possibility that this collider will make black holes. That is the reality, and all the other speculation about what will happen with the black holes is based on a false premise. There will be no black holes. That is the key point based on our understanding of physics. Everything else is built on fantasy and speculation.
High energy particles, particles with far more energy than what humans can create in a lab, are constantly colliding with the earth's upper atmostphere and creating all sorts havoc, yet we've not been sucked up into a mini-black hole yet.
As for your second point, I do so love rhetorical questions that confuse axioms with postulates. Especially as your question is easily enough answered (and shows lack of basic research skills). I shall leave it as an exercise to the interested reader (if any exist) to figure out why your point can either be correct about one part OR the other of what I wrote, but not both at the same time. It shouldn't take long. Personally, I prefer debates where it is the point under discussion, not the attributes of one of the discussors, that is debated. Put up, shut up or give up, but please can it with the personal insults.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think our national debt is having the same impact. Sucks everything in and nobody really cares until it is too late to do anything about it.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, it didn't burn the entire surface of the earth, just a small part of it. To be able burn the entire surface of the earth, someone would have to have thousands of them.
Also, as far as micro-black-holes go, aren't they supposed to have mass comparable to an electron? That doesn't seem like very much risk of sucking in anything at all. In fact, aren't microscopic-black-holes supposed to be incapable of actually making contact with anything, because their gravitational tidal forces render incoming particles into pure energy long before they ever reach the event horizon? I remember reading that black holes of all scales could convert as much as 50% of incoming matter into energy simply by the tremendous tidal forces exerted.
This must be some of that "viral marketing" stuff, to drum up some interest in the project. Maybe lonelyphysicist15 will comment.
1) if an artificial black hole instantly swallows Earth, what about the moon?
2) if an artificial black hole grows slowly, then wouldn't it be possible to encapsulate it in a space capsule and throw it to the sun?
3) if its expansion could be controlled (somehow), wouldn't it prove to be a weapon of mass destruction?
4) if an artificial black hole can be totally controlled (i.e. created and destroyed at will), could it be used to swallow all our garbage?
"Old Earth: The original Earth, believed to have been destroyed by The Big Mistake of '08 (in which a miniature black hole was dropped into it), but later shown to have been spirited away by 'other' beings of godlike abilities and consciousness."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos
Looking back in retrospect
...
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
It would have to somehow absorb a few hundred metric tons of matter to even last 1 second.
And so you see here, everyone, that the microscaled cyclonic intensity will evaporate in a mere nanosecond thus proving what we scientists have postulated for years. If you'll just put on your safety googles, I'll activate the wallydoodle... and the entire experiment is alrady ov... oh... glaven! With the swirling colors and the impending darkness and the disappearing laboratory which would have explained my genius!
If the earth dies.. its probably a whole lot of _good_ to the galaxy.. or even the universe. I mean look what we have done with this planet.
-AC
The fact that we do know, is that our Sun and Earth is young - formed later than average star/planet in this galaxy.
By the time the first life arose on Earth, countless stars and planets have already passed through their full life cycle - so no, if life (according to Fermi's calculations) is supposed to be in many, many places, then it's not really sensible to expect that life wasn't even on a single one of all the planets that got to Sun/Earth like maturity before Earth was even formed out of space dust.
... you wouldn't care about the death of someone who doesn't have any friends or family?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Why the concern about miniature black holes? Every single day, perfectly ordinary cosmic rays impact the Earth's atmosphere with more energy than the LHC could ever hope to achieve. If modern accelerators can create miniature black holes (and there's a good chance they can), then so can cosmic rays.
The LHC is specced to accelerate protons to 7 TeV, and they'll be colliding two proton beams head-on for a total of 14 TeV (1.4×10^13 eV). In comparison, Oh My God! particles are in the vicinity of 10^20 eV (10 million times LHC), and even cosmic rays of 10^16 eV (1 thousand times LHC) are a fairly ordinary occurence. And if you're thinking that the LHC is creating a type of collision that doesn't happen in nature, most cosmic rays are themselves protons or nuclei, which then collide with air nuclei to produce particle showers, the exact same thing the LHC is doing. The collisions are proton-proton in both LHC and nature, so there's no good reason why the LHC would produce black holes but strong cosmic rays wouldn't.
What's more, there's no justification for fearing short-lived microscopic black holes. Black holes aren't cosmic vacuum cleaners; they don't magically pull things in. Things fall in because of gravity -- i.e. because the black hole is heavy -- and a microscopic black hole doesn't have a strong gravitational field, because it just doesn't weigh that much. That means that a microscopic black hole can only grow because things randomly wander into it -- and keep in mind that it's far, far smaller than an atom. Instead, Earth would pull the black hole into it!
Now, assuming that by some miracle the particle physicists were exactly right about the existence and behavior of protons yet exactly wrong about Hawking radiation, a miniature black hole granted such immortality would fall right through the Earth, whoosh past the center, zip through the other side, then proceed to orbit within the Earth in a similar fashion for the next 10,000 years, gradually nibbling away at the occasional nucleus that happened to be in the way. Eventually it would grow in mass enough that it would settle within the solid iron core of the planet, where it would eventually eat enough to destabilize the core, causing massive earthquakes and very slowly devouring the Earth from within, ultimately resulting in a black hole smaller than a marble (9 mm, roughly 0.2 in), possibly surrounded by an asteroid-size chunk of solid rock that could support its own weight with a hollow core.
Frankly, though, I'm more worried about George W. Bush gaining highly improbable mutant powers, flying into space to save the Space Shuttle, inadvertently merging with the Dark Phoenix, and scheming to destroy the world. It's about as likely, i.e. no chance in hell, and worrying about it occupies the same amount of time, i.e. zero seconds lifetime total.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
I believe that black holes are entrances to a another void/universe. When a star collapses on itself it creates a tear/openning in our universe, which in term is called a black hole. This openning acts as a vacuum pulling in light and matter. (Like when you poke a small hole in a water balloon. The pressure on the inside is less than the pressure on the outside so the balloon leaks). Could mean that our universe is inside of a larger universe and so on? Black holes recycle all matter in the universe and are able to compress protons, neutrons and electrons into a state of singularity. So once the black hole has acumulated enough matter, the energy becomes greater than the mass and quantum fluctuations start. This is when the Big Bang occures and new stars are born then die and create black holes to repeate this cycle. There are to many theories running through my head! Tell me what you think.
Semantics nazi.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
In thousands of years we will have computers capable of simulating life as we know it. The supercomputers that we have today are able to do complex simulations with stars and evolution. Its not going to be to long before they can simulate extremely real AI with their own thoughts, pain and consciousness. The universe and life as we know it might be a advanced version of the game "The Sims" from the future! We think that we are real, but are we?
Also, since e=mc^2 is a bi-directional function, it should be possible to "fuse" photons into matter. That's what happened in the early universe - matter is far far younger than the universe itself. However, c is very very large, so c^2 is horrifyingly gigantic, which makes creating matter an extremely difficult problem. However, if you rely on atom-smashing, you cannot possibly prove that you have produced every subatomic particle that could exist, as there are starting points that are entirely valid but are not atoms and some of these starting points are just too unstable and short-lived to smash up. There are therefore some particles which will need to be manufactured from simpler components - not an easy task, but obviously possible as it has been done in accelerators in the past. That only works for relatively large synthetic particles, though. You cannot fabricate something that is on the same scale as a higg's particle but different, as the higg's particle is the smallest you can get and still have matter. Beyond that is just energy. If you wanted to see if alternative solutions exist for particles on that scale, you would need to condense it out of energy. You've no choice in the matter, because that's the building block on that scale.
(Also, quantum foam is littered with quantum black holes and quantum worm holes. Your left eyeball contains more quantum-scale black holes than all the micro-scale black holes that every accelerator on Earth will generate from now until the sun runs out of hydrogen fuel. No, you can't use that as an excuse in an eye exam. You can use it as a demonstration of why such phenomena are of absolutely no significance, though.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I doubt we'll care much about 9/11 after... oh wait, I've said too much.
Yeah; best to keep quiet about the upcoming Incident. If you talk too much, they'll think you were part of it. It's safer to just be quiet about what you know.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
D'oh. Hadn't thought of my I'm-a-time-traveler joke as an I'm-a-terrorist joke. Now I'm going to get visited by the men with round patches.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
Republicans weren't conservatives in 1860. Democrats were. The two parties have pretty much exchanged positions on everything significant in the interim.
My book, podcast
The mini black holes have allready been observed. So their behabiour is known, no wories..
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.