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Micro-Black Holes Make Poor Planet Killers
astroengine writes "Physicists are getting excited about the possibility of micro-black holes (MBH) being produced by the LHC and an international group of researchers have done the math to see what kind of impact they could have on the Earth. Unfortunately, if you're a megalomaniac looking for your next globe-eating weapon, you can scrub MBHs off your WMD list. If a speedy MBH is produced, flying through our planet, it will only have a few seconds to accrete the mass of a few atoms. It would then be lost to space where it will evaporate. If a slow MBH is produced, dropping into the Earth where it sits for a few billion years, the results are even more boring."
Sadly however, people will read this article and will still freak out about how the LHC is going to doom us all.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Ah, the fear of the unknown. Yes, a classic. "I don't understand it, and I don't believe that they do either".
I've got news for you; this is as good (or should i say precise) model of these things as you are going to get right now. It's the cutting edge of our understanding of how MBHs work, and _that_ understanding in turn depends on a quite large, quite solid foundation of math and physics.
So please, this isn't speculation, it's SCIENCE.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
"Calculating how quickly a micro-black-hole would accumulate mass strikes me as a great undergrad tutorial question."
Which implies using existing theories to calculate it. What I think the grand parent post is saying is that we don't know for sure our current theories are all correct. After all, if we knew it all 100% correctly, there wouldn't be any need to build the LHC.
Scientific evidence accumulates over time. In science, its extremely hard to say 100% correct and be very careful of anyone who claims different.
Our current theories are our best current understanding of the universe and they do indeed work well. But we cannot be 100% sure. In the case of creating a black hole we won't know for sure until we create one under the conditions in the LHC (which due to the grouping of particle collisions in the LHC is different from a single high speed collision happening in the upper atmosphere).
Throughout the history of science we can see time and time again where theories were overturned. We therefore cannot assume all our current theories are correct under all possible conditions. There could be factors we are so far ignoring.
The problem is, the creation of a black hole in the LHC is kind of a unique experiment, as most wrong answers in science don't have such horrific results if our current theories are wrong.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
In this case it's quite different. It's not religious zealots crying wolf at something they don't understand. It's rational people, some of them scientists, saying that we really don't know for sure, that our current knowledge could be flawed. A real scientist should always be ready to question our current knowledge.
Another way to put it: if we were so sure that what we know is 100% correct then we wouldn't need to build the LHC to test our theories in the first place.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Black-holes are not a source of energy (excluding the monumentally tiny energy output via Hawking radiation), any energy gained harnessing black-holes would be from the accretion disk around them in which particles accelerating towards the black-hole emit radiation due to friction among themselves. However, you'd likely need a stellar-mass black-hole to get a realistic accretion disk going.
Anyway, ZPMs aren't hard to find, you just need Ancient-built replicator civilisations or time travel.
The argument goes like this: There are plenty of cosmic rays which impact our atmosphere, the other planets in the solar system, the sun, other stars, everything, with energies across a huge spectrum, including LHC energies. Either the LHC will produce MBH or it will not. If it will, then cosmic rays also produce MBH, and do so without destroying any of the things we can see in the sky, so MBH from the LHC would similarly not destroy the earth. If the LHC will not produce MBH, then we have nothing to worry about in that regard anyway.
;)
This argument works for just about any Earth destroying LHC scenario, except, I suppose, the time traveling killer Higgs
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Which implies using existing theories to calculate it. What I think the grand parent post is saying is that we don't know for sure our current theories are all correct. After all, if we knew it all 100% correctly, there wouldn't be any need to build the LHC.
This line of logic is ridiculous. We're building the LHC to explore many things, one of which is probing a few plausible alternate theories that predict black hole production at a measurable rate. But the assumption that that means we can't come up with logically-consistent explanations of how such a black-hole would behave is ridiculous. You can put some bounds on it, right? You can say that a black hole won't make bunnies leap out of the wall. Not because it *sounds* ridiculous, but because there's no mathematically and logically internally consistent theory under which such a thing could happen. You can keep moving this line until you start finding regimes of behavior that might be consistent with new theories allowed, compatible with previous observations but allowing new ones under these new conditions. And that's what theorists are doing!
Any claim of unexpected behavior without a plausible and mathematically self-consistent theory to back it up is baseless. Which isn't to say one doesn't exist (the whole absence of evidence thing), but until one does, there's just as much sense to prepare for the coming bunny invasion.