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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."
Actually it's freshman-level physics. Calculating how quickly a micro-black-hole would accumulate mass strikes me as a great undergrad tutorial question.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
you'd have to figure out a way to suspend it inside your spaceship and travel along with your spaceship.. which would have to be spherical because different gravitational magnitudes being exerted on different parts of your body has got to be uncomfortable.
Even with it being spherical, your feet would get a noticeably larger gravitational force than your head.. blood circulation might become an issue. Somebody with too much time on their hands could probably work out the 'safe' minimal radius of the sphere surface you'd be walking on.
The math that suggests that a quantum black hole will evaporate in an instant may be fairly advanced, but the math showing that even if Hawking is completely wrong such a black hole would have no noticeable effect on the earth over a 13 billion year period is not all that advanced.
Then there's simple logic. While LHC may produce the most powerful collisions ever under our control, nature routinely produces much more powerful collisions including cosmic rays. Clearly, in billions of years none of this has resulted in a planet eating black hole.