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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."
I guess I know what kind of girl to look for now ;)
U+F8FF
Sorry, but I really feel the need to be afraid of something irrational.
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?
Ironically, it sucks to be them :)
Summation 2
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"
How much red matter does the LHC use anyway?
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
I'm sure there's somebody on /. who can answer this:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought to be a black hole you had to be 2 things.
1. a singularity
2. heavy/massive enough to stop anything from escaping
If you've got a singularity (worst case in our example) that's the mass of the earth, how's that supposed to stop any light/matter/etc escaping? It's not massive enough!
or am I missing something.
Also, please excuse my lack of correct terminology. IANAAP
this post is now diamonds!
Well, the key isn't just mass, but also radius. Gravity (I'll go newtonian, just because I'm lazy) increased linearly with mass, but decreases with the square of the radius. So for example, if you packed something the mass of Earth in just half the size of Earth, the gravity on the surface would be 4 times that of Earth. Squeeze it into a quarter of the size of Earth and get 16 times the gravity on the surface. Squeeze it small enough and you have a black hole.
If you do the proper maths, the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole with the mass of Earth is about 9mm.
Which really means, don't think something that will suck matter and bend light spectacularly all the way to Alpha Centauri. It means that if light happens to go within 9mm of that singularity, it ain't coming out. But farther away, it's still a body with the mass of Earth. The moon's orbit will still have the same radius for example.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I heard this months ago on /. , it's hardly news to those who had actually been following things.
If there was any serious cause for concern, this wouldn't be going ahead. I doubt every scientist working on the project is also desiring to commit suicide/genocide/planetacide/whatever.
which is totally what she said
"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.
What people don't realize is that this study was funded by companies that produce black holes.
This is my sig.
This sucks.
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.
Mass = Energy...it evaporates by emitting other forms of energy (light, etc).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Am I the only one who reads MBH as mega black hole, not micro black hole? It's confusing. If the prefix is micro, it would make sense to use a letter that actually means micro, instead of a letter that represents mega.
"... if you're a megalomaniac looking for your next globe-eating weapon,... a speedy MBH ... flying through our planet... will only have a few seconds to accrete the mass of ... the Earth ."
WE'RE DOOMED!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Particles. A hand-waving description of what happens is as follows:
Pairs of particles (one matter, one antimatter) form randomly near the event horizon. One quantum-tunnels out of the black-hole and so appears to an observer outside the black-hole to have been emitted. Therefore, to conserve energy, the other particle must have negative energy and thus the black-hole loses a tiny parcel of energy (and thus mass).
The main point is that, because the particle was formed near the event horizon and didn't come from the black-hole itself, it carries no information out - thus, while the black-hole loses mass, no information can escape.
Photons pop out of the vacuum all the time. A photon and an anti-photon (or do they call it a virtual photon) will appear at the same time, and as long as the pair doesn't stick around longer than the mass * Plank's constant, conservation of mass is preserved.
If the photon and anti-photon appear at the edge of a black hole, sometimes the photon goes off, and the anti-photon gets sucked into the black hole where it cancels some of the mass of the black hole. Thus it looks like the BH is radiating and evaporating, but nothing actual leaves the BH.
*Note: I've left out some details, and my terminology might be off.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
To answer point 2, current evidence is that human radio signals will be distorted by the heliopause at the edge of the solar system such that they are undetectable from outside. Therefore, an incredibly strong and likely custom-built communication system would be needed to penetrate deep space and be detectable by aliens.
Secondly, while the Universe might be vast, we can only really stand a chance of picking up signals from within the Milky Way (and even then only fairly nearby, excluding stupendously powerful transmitters, perhaps), so the number of stars that could potentially signal us is vastly reduced.
Lastly, you have to limit that to only stars with habitable planets on which life has formed and evolved to a high level than ours, and then transmitted signals of sufficient power that reached Earth during the 50 or so years we've been listening.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's well worth using SETI etc to look but I don't think we should be shocked that we haven't found anything.
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.
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.
I'm more worried about the possibility of a resonance cascade.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
Ah, but that's not the case.
On small scales, that is true. However, take the moon. Electromagnetically it's neutral, however it exerts a sizeable gravitational pull. As the Schwartzchild radius is proportional to mass (not mass squared or cubed, but mass), if one took instead 8 moons and packed them together in a cuboid arrangement, the mass has increased eight-fold while the radius has only doubled. Therefore if we keep adding mass, there will come a point when the Scwarzschild radius is larger than the radius of the huge moon-array and therefore the whole moon-array has an escape velocity greater than the speed of light and is therefore a black-hole.
Now imagine if all those moons are positively charged - it still doesn't matter, because no matter the strength of the outward force it cannot give them a velocity greater than that of the speed of light, so they remain a black-hole.
Gravity is so significant on large scales precisely because of this - with no negative charge, gravity is the most significant force at large distance scales.
Well, yes, any matter you throw at it (and energy converts neatly to matter too) can only cause it to grow. But there's still the problem of how much and how close.
But, really, let's do some simple maths.
Let's say we want to produce a black hole the size of a helium atom. You know, big enough to occasionally actually bounce into stuff and gobble it up. (Remember, only matter coming closer than the Schwarzschild radius is actually gobbled up.) It's not a big black hole, but it has the potential to grow. So we apply:
r = (2G/c^2) * m ... Where the thing in brackets is approx 1.5 * 10^-27 m/kg. We'll want to get a hole measuring 3x10^-11 m. So we'd need a mass of 2x10^15 kg, or two millions of millions of metric tons.
Yep, that huge a mass will only gobble stuff up if it comes within 3x10^-11m of it. But it's a start, and as an evil genius you may have to start small ;)
To produce that hole, the protons we throw at it, as a total, will have to have the equivalent of that much mass in energy.
Let's transform that into MeV though, since we are talking energy. 1MeV is about 1.8x10^-36 Kg. Let's round to 2x10^-36, since we're only doing a back-of-the-napkin calculation, and are only interested in rough ballpark figures. So we're talking about 10^51 MeV
If we got that energy from uranium, and assuming that we could (A) split every single U235 atom, and (B) capture 100% of the released energy, each atom split releases 180 MeV. (RL reactors don't come even close in both aspects.) Again, let's round it up to 200. (In my fantasy land, reactors are better than 100% efficient;)
That works out to about 5*10^48 uranium atoms split. Avogadro's number being about 6x10^23, that's about 10^25 moles of uranium. (Again, I'm only interested in the order of magnitude. Plus, we rounded up in the other direction before, so it evens up.) And a mole of U235 weighs 235 grams, or about half a pound or almost a quarter kilo.
We're talking about 2 to 3 times 10^24 kilos of uranium, or 2 to 3 times 10^21 _tons_ of U235. That's 2-3 thousand billions of billions of tons of U235. Or about a hundred thousands of billions of billions of reactor-grade enriched uranium. Completely used up in a 100% effective reactor.
So basically yes we _could_ make a bigger black hole by keeping throwing stuff at it, close to the speed of light, but the energy requirements are nuts even to get a hole the size of a helium atom. We don't even _have_ the kind of reactors and capacitors where you could split a hundred thousands of billions of billions of reactor-grade uranium and dump it all into just creating a black hole.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The thing I'd add to that is that there are no anti-photons -- photons are their own anti-particle.
That's correct, but something I've never wrapped my mind around. When the photon and photon-prime are created, then one falls into the black hole, how does the BH know that its photon should cancel mass, rather than increase it?
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
TFA calculates the likely results based on higher dimensional brane physics. It was done earlier in more classical relativity maths and the results summarized in Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log. The max mass was greater and thus life time longer. Still, mass and accretion never crossed the limit that would allow it to reach whatever they call critical mass for these thing. The example given was that if it were charged and it were trapped within the electron cloud of an atom (both conditions lending it additional life span), it would circulate there on the order of weeks before encountering an electron which it could then consume. Even if it did so it would evaporate before it could hit the run away point, and would likely evaporate before eating even one electron. The specific results were different but the conclusion the same - too small to live long enough to do any damage.
Another point made in Cosmic Log (I don't recall if it was the same person/calculations) was that quantum black holes (a more correct descriptor than 'mini-') of the mass and life span hypothesized would be likely to occur regularly in the atmosphere due to incoming primary cosmic rays. Those have been impacting the Earth for billions of years, and we're still here. The hypothesized Hawking radiation is not obvious, thus these may not even be occurring. In any case, their creation would be a highly improbable event.
That last assertion is strictly conjecture based on calculations by my Brambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain. Now if you'll excuse me I'm for a nice hot cup of tea.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
We can't be exactly sure, no.
However, even basic physics should be enough to determine that microscopic black holes aren't going to be particularly dangerous. The kind of black holes that could be created by the LHC have a very small mass - they're created by smashing a couple of subatomic particles into each other, after all. The total mass of the black hole can not possibly be higher than the total mass of the particles that created it.
That means that the black hole will have the same gravitational force as the particles that created it. Therefore, the event horizon of the black hole will be very small. Since matter is composed mostly of empty space, the chances of it actually hitting anything are remote, to say the least. In order for it to absorb a particle, it would have to almost collide with it. This is very unlikely, although given enough time probably will happen.
Worst case scenario - Hawking radiation doesn't exist. The micro black holes will continue to exist indefinitely, and will slowly consume the planet. Before the micro black hole has absorbed even a few kilograms of matter, the Sun will expand, swallowing the planet. The black holes will continue gradually consuming the Sun, and given a few quadrillion years or so (and the entire universe will be long dead by that point) might actually start to do some damage. By this point, I doubt that any humans will still be around to care. If we've managed to survive the destruction of our own planet, the death of our own star, and the death of the universe itself, a puny little black hole shouldn't be a problem.
More likely scenario - Hawking radiation does exist, and the micro black holes will simply evaporate before they even come close to absorbing anything else. No big deal. If we detect evidence of Hawking radiation, that pretty much confirms the existence of black holes, and Steven Hawking gets a Nobel prize.
Three Words (or one word and one name): Von Neuman Probes.
It should be relatively trivial for an advanced civilization to seed every star in the galaxy with self replicating probes. The initial investment would be only enough to construct the first generation and send them out, after that they would reproduce with local resources and send out the next wave. The apparent lack of such probes in our solar system should be, in my opinion, much more concerning to the SETI crowd than the lack of radio transmissions which would probably be impossible to detect from any significant distance anyway.
A week before they turn it on to produce the MBH and destroy the Earth I will buy anyones home for 5 cents on the dollar so they can spend their last week in a continuous state of Party.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
There's no such thing as an anti-photon. In the case you are describing - pair production - both of the particles are virtual particles. They can be an electron and a positron (anti-electron), a quark and its anti-quark, etc - any particle/antiparticle pair. However a photon is its own anti-particle. And your explanation of the uncertainly principle is wrong. The time-energy formulation says (uncertainty in time) * (uncertainty in energy) = hbar, so the time limit for the life of the virtual particles is Planck's constant / energy (or Planck's constant divided by mass, since mass and energy are proportional and we measure the mass of these particles in units of electron-volts anyhow). Note that if it's mass * hbar, as you have above, then the higher the mass is, the longer the particles can stick around! That's exactly backwards. It's the tiny little particles that are flickering in and out of existence, not huge massive objects! If it were mass*hbar, you'd have virtual planets, stars and galaxies - the larger the object the more likely it would be to suddenly appear out of nowhere! This is an amusing thought but doesn't accurately describe the reality that we find ourselves living in.
There's no such thing as an anti-photon. In the case you are describing - pair production - both of the particles are virtual particles. They can be an electron and a positron (anti-electron), a quark and its anti-quark, etc - any particle/antiparticle pair. However a photon is its own anti-particle. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiparticle ) And your explanation of the uncertainly principle is wrong. The time-energy formulation says (uncertainty in time) * (uncertainty in energy) = hbar, so the time limit for the life of the virtual particles is Planck's constant / energy (or Planck's constant divided by mass, since mass and energy are proportional and we measure the mass of these particles in units of electron-volts anyhow). Note that if it's mass * hbar, as you have above, then the higher the mass is, the longer the particles can stick around! That's exactly backwards. It's the tiny little particles that are flickering in and out of existence, not huge massive objects! If it were mass*hbar, you'd have virtual planets, stars and galaxies - the larger the object the more likely it would be to suddenly appear out of nowhere! This is an amusing thought but doesn't accurately describe the reality that we find ourselves living in.
This is a typical nonsense argument. You imply that because there are some things we don't know (e.g., questions to be answered by the LHC) that it's reasonably possible that we will encounter aberrant behavior that contradicts previous observation.
There are few avenues for the MBH to be incorrect. They already assume that we are wrong about Hawking radiation (otherwise an MBH would boil off immediately). The only real options are that energy conservation is violated and the LHC is able to somehow create a heavy black hole, or the gravitational pull of a MBH is somehow enormously higher than its mass-energy would permit. (As the Schwartzchild radius is directly derived from its gravitational pull, there's not really any room for this to be wrong.)
You actually picked the weak form of this argument.
Our planet is small and not particularly dense. There's only one, and something like MBH or strangelets could be fairly rare. We could be lucky.
Fortunately, there's an enormous field of stars, including large, dense neutron stars. Neutron stars are great at capturing errant particles, producing MBHes, and things like that. Looking at our estimates of the ages of these neutron stars, you can show that micro black holes cannot be responsible for stellar/planetary destruction.
which due to the grouping of particle collisions in the LHC is different from a single high speed collision happening in the upper atmosphere
This statement makes no sense. The quarks have no clue if they're in the atmosphere or the LHC.
The ignorant, murderous assholes who have been making a living for themselves inducing panic in people by waving their hands about LHC black holes have been making much of this "we don't know everything" rhetoric. But unlike the scientists who have performed these actual calculations, the ignorant murderous assholes have never produced any numbers: just vague handwaving and wild specuation that requires almost everything we know about physics to be wrong (expect for a few very carefully chosen bits they need to be right to keep thier speculations afloat.)
In fact, if you are worried about LHC black holes destroying the Earth then you should ALSO be worried that clicking your heels together three times and saying, "There's no place like home" will turn you into a bowl of cornflakes. After all, we can't be 100% sure it won't happen, and in fact the probability of it happening is slightly higher than the bizzare balance of known and novel physics that would be required to allow the LHC to create black holes, much less have them destroy the Earth.
So my question to the ignorant murderous assholes is: why are you making such a fuss about LHC black holes when there are so many millions of other things that pose a far greater risk to the Earth? Giant asteroid collisions caused by global warming (the atmosphere expands, increasing the odds of impact). Death by cell phone radiation interacting with the local galactic magentic field causing the Earth to fall into the sun. And so on. If you are worried about LHC black holes you have set the thresold for worry so low that if you aren't completely intellectually dishonest there are a vast array of other risks you should be in a panic about.
So why aren't you?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.
There's a nice equivocation in this statement: we can be as sure as we are of anything that LHC black holes won't destroy the Earth. If they did we'd see evidence in the cosmic-ray spectrum due to evaporating black hole signatures and the like, as well as the Earth not actually being here because it would have been destroyed in the past.
So while we do need to build the LHC to test theories regarding the Higgs boson, we do not need to build it to test theories regarding LHC black holes. That's the thing about science: all sources of experimental knowledge are equally valid, and you don't get to say our knowlege of black holes supposedly created by high energy collisions "doesn't count" because it comes from cosmic rays rather than accelerators.
Furthermore, I'm not sure why you and others keep bringing up the 100% correct thing. You can't be sure 100% certainty that the act of typing your next post into /. won't invoke some as-yet-to-be-discovered physical law and cause you to grow a second head. But for some reason you won't explain you aren't worried about that, even though you seem to pretend to be worried about LHC black holes destroying the Earth, which has no greater probablity.
Why is that? Why aren't you posting about all the other things that you can't be 100% sure of not destroying the Earth? Why only the LHC and not hitherto undiscovered physical laws that will cause the DROID phone to result in the death of us all? The "not 100% sure" standard is so silly that you'd have to terrified of damned near everything, if you were remotely intellectually honest.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The units of the "gravitational field" are not those of veloicty
No, they are units of acceleration, m/s^2. My point was that it is impossible for a finite gravitational field to accelerate anything to the speed of light. Not that the field itself equaled the speed of light, but that the field integrated over some finite time supposedly equaled the speed of light, which is impossible for any finite field.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
The problem with this whole situation is that I can't verify it myself in the next couple of days. I do not have the skills or foundational knowledge. The problem with this whole thing is that these scientists are asking 99.9999% of the public to trust them,w e won't get you killed by a black hole. We can't tell if they are worthy of that much trust. Maybe their calculations are tinged by self interest or tinged by interest in the the possible scientific discovery.
The point is, most of us have no way of knowing, but black holes have a way of sounding scary. We may be ignorant, but we are definitely self serving.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The main lesson of science is to be humble, all scientific models are "incorrect" in the long term.
But they're not *equally* incorrect. They're as good as they are useful at modeling the world around us in their particular regimes.
We don't put Newton by the wayside just because we know about GR. And likewise if GR is ever expanded on or replaced, we still might use it to correct the time-slew of GPS satellites. It's about the best tool available for the job. And right now, the best tool for making decisions about the behavior of black holes and high-energy interactions based on the evidence available is telling us not to worry. What cause otherwise *is* there to worry? The fact that the word "black hole" happens to relate to a concept that scares people?
I think the LHC has destroyed the world multiple times now. It is just that we here and now are the survivors of the disasters....
According to the Multi-verse theory, each quantum fluctuation creates a new universe or timeline.....
Because we are alive and well and not consumed by a black hole, that means in "our" branch of the multiverse we haven't created a Black Hole that swallows earth "yet".....
But fear not because Even if the LHC were to create a earth consuming black hole, strangelet, way to lower the energy level entire universe leading to it's immediate destruction. We will survive because at least one branch of timeline will survive by failing to create these anomolies and go on to branch out some more to survive whatever weird physics experiments we dream up of go arwy.....
The only problem is when creating black hols and exotic matter that is large enough to reduce quantum probability and then we are really screwed.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Gravity is much, much weaker than the subatomic electrostatic forces that hold subatomic particles apart.
It really isn't, not in the way that you mean. Yes the Gravitational Constant is much smaller than Coulomb's Constant, and yes the gravitational attraction between two protons is much weaker than the electrostatic repulsion between two protons.
However as soon as you do anything more complicated than compare two charged particles, things change. The reason is because the two forces bind to different properties of matter, and while the charge property can be both positive and negative, mass is only positive. So while the gravitational force between two hydrogen atoms is very small, it is bigger than the electrostatic force between them because they are carrying no net charge.
Thus gravity can easily be the stronger force in any given situation, because the forces of opposite charges will cancel, while their masses will only add together. Put enough mass together, and the gravitational force can easily outstrip every other force.
In essence, what you're claiming in a black hole is a neutron star - a single massive nucleus - packed together as tightly as is physically possible for matter to be packed. This is impossible on the most basic level: the larger an atomic nucleus gets, the more unstable it is. There are no stable atomic nuclei any larger than lead-208.
Kind of an ironic statement, since the electrostatic force is much, much weaker than the strong nuclear force which holds the protons together, and yet it is exactly because of the electrostatic force overcoming the strong force that these atoms become unstable. Because the strong force is only stronger in the same naive way in which electromagnetism is stronger than gravity.
Also ironic because gravity overcoming electrostatic forces is also responsible for the existence of all of those large, unstable atoms in the first place. Fusing even two hydrogen atoms requires overcoming the repulsion of their nuclei when very close, and it's the intense heat and pressure in the core of a star -- caused by its immense mass -- which allows this. As the star over time fuses heavier elements the energy released decreases until lead where it crosses over into negative. At this point all the fusion energy that was holding the mass of the star up fails, and all that mass in the outer portions of the star collapses in due to gravity, and that transfer of energy fuses atoms much, much heavier than lead and leads to all the unstable elements we find on earth plus many that don't last long enough to become part of a planet.
Gravity, the "weakest" force, creates atoms which the strong interaction, the "strongest" force, cannot hold together!
So, obviously the situation is more complex than just making a blanket statement that one force is stronger than the other.
The enemies of Democracy are
Oh, you mean like the possibility of the earths atmosphere igniting and killing all life on earth? This was one possibility of the first atomic bomb test. Still did it anyway. Nothing happened.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
The sun won't ever go black hole because there's not enough mass to overcome the electron repulsion between iron atoms.
The sun isn't big enough to become a supernova either, since the remains of the star AFTER burning all the fusion products would have to be heavier than the sun is NOW (and it will lose mass as it reaches red giant stage).
And since the earth would orbit further away if the sun were lighter but the total energy (gravitational potential + kinetic) were the same for the earth, there's a good chance the earth would spiral out as the sun loses mass into its red giant phase and not get burned inside the sun's larger atmosphere, even though that would extend beyond the current orbit of the earth.
And there's no such thing as "drag" as you describe it. Photon pressure is about 1.6 pounds per square meter at 1 AU. Total force on the earth would be ~2 million pound force. Since the earth weighs 10^21lbs, the acceleration would naff all.
So, no, an object put at earth's position with a sun that was dead (solid iron is the only option, but even if it were a black hole, the idea is the same) it wouldn't collapse in because there's no decay in the orbit.
You've watched Disney's "The Black Hole" and thought it was a documentary, I think.
There's no such theory as one your message proposes someone else to have thought up.
Short answer: because the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light inside the Schwartzschild radius, matter cannot travel outwards, but also cannot stay stationary (to prove this properly you need some fairly complex general relativity). Because of this it can only head towards the centre of mass, so the matter all converges on a single point. As the escape velocity only increases as one gets closer to the centre, this forces all the matter into a single point of spacetime, the singularity.
This is, at least, what general relativity tells us. However, it's impossible to know for sure, as one of the properties of black-holes is that it is considered impossible for information to escape the event horizon.