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."

Comments

Re:Lots of speculation.

[MindKata]

"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.

Re:Lots of speculation.

[The_Wilschon]

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 ;)