Why black holes made by the LHC will not suck the earth in and will not kill us.
I'm going to make this public, 'cause I think it's something for the public to know.
So let's be real about black holes, shall we?
The LHC would produce collisions at a maximum energy of 1,150 tera-electron-volts - this is for collisions between two lead ions. I'm not sure if this is the total energy of both or if each has this energy. But let's assume the latter, for a worst-case scenario. That sounds big, but an electron volt is 1.6 x 10^-19 Joules - two ten-quintillionths of a four-thousandth of a single food calorie. Converted to mass, 1150 TeV is a dinky 2 x 10^-21 kg. Double that and you have 4 x 10^-21 kg. Even if you factor in the rest masses of the two lead ions. Four quintillionths of a gram. That's lighter than a virus. The Schwarzschild radius for this 2300 TeV black hole is 6 x 10^-48 meters. That's over a trillion times smaller than the Planck Length, the hypothetical scale for the unification of gravity with the other three forces. For comparison, an atomic nucleus has a size of about 10^-15 m, and a whole atom is 10,000 times bigger than that.
And even if such a black hole can exist, there's something called Hawking radiation that would blow these tiny little suckers apart before they'd get a chance to suck anything in. The time it would take for a black hole of LHC-collision mass to evaporate is about 6 x 10^-78 seconds. The thing would practically never have existed! And the energy it releases is only about one ten-millionth of a food calorie.
Ok. So that's something to shake a stick at. And the stick would barely feel the heat. But what about the best subatomic-particle-accelerating technology known to the human race: Mother Nature?
Well, the "MNC" (Mother Nature Collider) can produce cosmic rays - subatomic particles - with energies up to the kinetic energy of a fastball, or 10^20 electron-volts. That's about 100,000 times more energy than the LHC. Two of these "cosmic baseballs" colliding could produce a microscopic black hole of mass 3.6 x 10^-16 kilograms. That's around the mass of a bacterium. Its Schwarzschild radius would be a miniscule 5.3 x 10^-43 meters, or a few hundred-millionths of the Planck length. It would last a measly 3.8 x 10^-63 seconds, and explode with a force of...get this...8 small calories, or around a hundredth of a food calorie. It's less dangerous than a can of Pepsi One.
That's still something to shake a stick at, although the stick would warm up by a few degrees. Big bleepin' whoop. And the LHC can't even create particles of that kind of energy.
But let's say, somehow, we outdid nature by untold orders of magnitude and the LHC could produce a black hole the mass of a person. Let's say the mass of a person is 75 kg. That would produce a black hole with a Schwarzschild radius of 1.11 x 10^-25 meters, or 10 billion times smaller than the size of an atomic nucleus. Its Hawking radiation evaporation time would be about 3.5 x 10^-11 seconds - a few hundredths of a nanosecond. Hardly enough time to run into those extremely-far-apart-by-its-standards atomic nuclei and snowball into a monster that will eat the bleepin' earth. But it would explode with the force of 16 one-hundred-megaton nuclear bombs, destroying the LHC and most of what's in its vicinity. No one would live to tell the tale of what happened. But we could guess it was a human-mass black hole by its effects, assuming we can rule out a fairly small meteorite crash or some enemy of the LHC dropping 16 nuclear bombs on the complex all at once.
Hell, if you produced a black hole the mass of a blue whale - 200,000 kilograms - it would only be three thousand times bigger, which is still a few tens of millionths of the size of an atomic nucleus, and would last about 2/3 of a second - not enough time to accumulate much mass and suck up the earth. It would probably not encounter a single electron or nucleus in that time. Although, when that black hole blew up, it would release the equivalent energy of 43,000 one-hundred-megaton nuclear bombs, which, fair enough, probably could destroy the world as we know it. Maybe not blow up the entire Earth, but eradicate all but the hardiest life forms.
But the mass of a blue whale is, oh, about a sextillion cosmic baseballs or 50 septillion typical LHC collisions.
In any case, we do not have the technology to accelerate atoms to the point where they would collide to create the mass of a blue whale, or even a person.
And if we could, it would most likely destroy the world not by sucking the Earth in, but by exploding due to its Hawking radiation.
So let's be real about black holes, shall we?
The LHC would produce collisions at a maximum energy of 1,150 tera-electron-volts - this is for collisions between two lead ions. I'm not sure if this is the total energy of both or if each has this energy. But let's assume the latter, for a worst-case scenario. That sounds big, but an electron volt is 1.6 x 10^-19 Joules - two ten-quintillionths of a four-thousandth of a single food calorie. Converted to mass, 1150 TeV is a dinky 2 x 10^-21 kg. Double that and you have 4 x 10^-21 kg. Even if you factor in the rest masses of the two lead ions. Four quintillionths of a gram. That's lighter than a virus. The Schwarzschild radius for this 2300 TeV black hole is 6 x 10^-48 meters. That's over a trillion times smaller than the Planck Length, the hypothetical scale for the unification of gravity with the other three forces. For comparison, an atomic nucleus has a size of about 10^-15 m, and a whole atom is 10,000 times bigger than that.
And even if such a black hole can exist, there's something called Hawking radiation that would blow these tiny little suckers apart before they'd get a chance to suck anything in. The time it would take for a black hole of LHC-collision mass to evaporate is about 6 x 10^-78 seconds. The thing would practically never have existed! And the energy it releases is only about one ten-millionth of a food calorie.
Ok. So that's something to shake a stick at. And the stick would barely feel the heat. But what about the best subatomic-particle-accelerating technology known to the human race: Mother Nature?
Well, the "MNC" (Mother Nature Collider) can produce cosmic rays - subatomic particles - with energies up to the kinetic energy of a fastball, or 10^20 electron-volts. That's about 100,000 times more energy than the LHC. Two of these "cosmic baseballs" colliding could produce a microscopic black hole of mass 3.6 x 10^-16 kilograms. That's around the mass of a bacterium. Its Schwarzschild radius would be a miniscule 5.3 x 10^-43 meters, or a few hundred-millionths of the Planck length. It would last a measly 3.8 x 10^-63 seconds, and explode with a force of...get this...8 small calories, or around a hundredth of a food calorie. It's less dangerous than a can of Pepsi One.
That's still something to shake a stick at, although the stick would warm up by a few degrees. Big bleepin' whoop. And the LHC can't even create particles of that kind of energy.
But let's say, somehow, we outdid nature by untold orders of magnitude and the LHC could produce a black hole the mass of a person. Let's say the mass of a person is 75 kg. That would produce a black hole with a Schwarzschild radius of 1.11 x 10^-25 meters, or 10 billion times smaller than the size of an atomic nucleus. Its Hawking radiation evaporation time would be about 3.5 x 10^-11 seconds - a few hundredths of a nanosecond. Hardly enough time to run into those extremely-far-apart-by-its-standards atomic nuclei and snowball into a monster that will eat the bleepin' earth. But it would explode with the force of 16 one-hundred-megaton nuclear bombs, destroying the LHC and most of what's in its vicinity. No one would live to tell the tale of what happened. But we could guess it was a human-mass black hole by its effects, assuming we can rule out a fairly small meteorite crash or some enemy of the LHC dropping 16 nuclear bombs on the complex all at once.
Hell, if you produced a black hole the mass of a blue whale - 200,000 kilograms - it would only be three thousand times bigger, which is still a few tens of millionths of the size of an atomic nucleus, and would last about 2/3 of a second - not enough time to accumulate much mass and suck up the earth. It would probably not encounter a single electron or nucleus in that time. Although, when that black hole blew up, it would release the equivalent energy of 43,000 one-hundred-megaton nuclear bombs, which, fair enough, probably could destroy the world as we know it. Maybe not blow up the entire Earth, but eradicate all but the hardiest life forms.
But the mass of a blue whale is, oh, about a sextillion cosmic baseballs or 50 septillion typical LHC collisions.
In any case, we do not have the technology to accelerate atoms to the point where they would collide to create the mass of a blue whale, or even a person.
And if we could, it would most likely destroy the world not by sucking the Earth in, but by exploding due to its Hawking radiation.