Try this headline: Black Hole Eats Earth - International Herald Tribune view story

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iht.com — CERN may destroy the planet. They don't think so, but they aren't sure.

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Comments (10)

  1. Good Topic ! Thanks

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  2. If there is ANY chance of melting the earth... I say lets just skip the proton smashing and call it a day. AMIRITE?

    I mean, being a guy, I understand the whole "boys with toys" thing, but damn... I'd bet black holes got some game and probably ain't nuttin' to f*%# with.

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  3. Great, so all my debt will be wiped off.

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  4. Yes! Imagine. The end of all wars!

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  5. OMG this article and a few like it when the LHC was preparing test irk the shit outta me. This is what happens when MSM takes a little bit of science, mixx with what they see with the movies and come out with a doomsday scenario of something they just plain don't understand. And those two dip$hits that are suing the LHC and Cern are just morons. Environmental impact study for a particle accelerator? Ok perhaps for the construction of it, yes. After that doesn't matter, the only thing those accelerators destroy is money and atoms.

    Ok, lets say it does create a black hole, the thing would be on such a small scale (plank sized) that it would evaporate before consuming any matter to sustain itself. All this would happen in less time than it takes to squeeze out a third of a fart. The "stranglet" particle is beyond laughable. One sub-atomic particle isn't going to do jack to an oreo cookie, much more earth. See. Conservation of Mass & Energy.

    "But Wagner is not mollified. "They've got a lot of propaganda saying it's safe," he said in an interview, "but basically it's propaganda.""

    OMG, now lets villify scientists. If anything the guy should be pissed about money spent not what happens there. This guy really does not understand the scale these things work on. Its small, very small. Take the head of a pin, divided it about 1000 times and you're still working on scales bigger than the protons they smash together.

    Bottom line is Walter L Wagner and his fellow Hawaiian Luis Sancho should worry about plants, because they're botanist. There's a reason these guys couldn't graduate with advanced physics degrees and this law suit proves it. If anything I think this law suit is just a result of them not being accepted into an advanced particle physics program.

    So to Walter L Wagner and his fellow Hawaiian Luis Sancho, SUCK ON THESE ATOMS!!!!!!

    P.S. I could have easily have written pages on this, but I was too aggravated to.

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  6. I love that the dude thinks there's a very real possibility that the Earth could be destroyed... but he filed the suit in Hawaii just to save some cash.

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  7. Bdog2g2: For black holes size does not mater because bend even space and time. So microscopic black hole may swallow up the solar system quickly and grow while at it. This is sheer madness. Even the slightest possibility of DESTROYING THE WORLD (!!!) means you should stop that instantly and bury it for all ages.
    I feel as if Darth Vader is around there corner waiting for this technology to use it in the death star prototype. It's ridiculous to take such a risk but if we are a planet of morons to let them go we probably deserve to perish.

    Stop messing with the planet. Go solar.

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  8. While I'm sure you were being factious, I'll still entertain this argument.

    "For black holes size does not mater because bend even space and time. So microscopic black hole may swallow up the solar system quickly and grow while at it."

    Size does matter. Look up Hawking Radiation. Black Holes aren't the uber holes in the universe sci-fi has made them out to be. They have to reach a certain mass in order to sustain themselves or they evaporate due to Hawking Radiation. And black holes can't ingest everything at once just like you cannot force all the water in a bathtub down the drain all at once. As more and more matter spirals in, it heats up, creating a radiation pressure that slows down incoming matter, creating a self-regulating valve.

    The black holes that could, possibly be created by these reactors are 6 orders of magnitude smaller than microscopic. At this size they would have to immediately consume any stray protons to maintain their current size, much less grow. Since particle beams are housed in a vacuum chamber , this would be unlikely.

    Now, for arguments sake, lets say that the our pico-scopic black hole sticks around for more than a few billionths of a second. As stated before it would have to attract and ingest some type of matter immediately or risk evaporating from its own radiation. Now while black holes are the ultimate gravity source they suffer from a fundamental weakness of gravity, distance. As you move farther from a mass, the strength of its gravitational field decreases inversely to the distance squared. Meaning, that any given mass' gravitational influence decreases very rapidly once you move away from it. On the scales we're talking, the nearest proton would be a vast distance away. It would be like Earth yanking a comet from the Orrt Cloud and drawing it in directly (for references, this means impossible).

    "Stop messing with the planet. Go solar.

    And what they're doing at CERN or LHC, have nothing to do with alternative energy sources or any energy sources for that matter. They're trying to find the Higgs Boson, among other particles, but the Higgs (if proven) would help understand the least understood force, gravity. I could go into a whole other lecture on that.

    "Even the slightest possibility of DESTROYING THE WORLD (!!!) "

    Sure there's a slightest possibility, but there's a better chance that the sun will throw out a solar flare (a hiccup by its standards) and frying off our outer atmosphere and we all die that way than by a black hole or any other exotic matter created in these accelerators.

    "It's ridiculous to take such a risk"

    Many said that when we broke the sound barrier. They believe that if you did, the atmosphere would ignite. They said the sky would catch on fire at the first atomic blast. Oh, and we also once thought there were men on the moon, so we shouldn't go there to bother them. What these people do is not about risk its about discovery and trust me I'm sure their risk assessments are orders of magnitude higher than our "TRUSTED" elected officials we rely on for War, Economy, Education, and Health.

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  9. Great post. Whether destruction of the universe is a possible outcome or not, it's an interesting question whether scientists should be allowed to run bizarre experiments in physics or biology that affect the whole planet.

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Onreact onreact.com submitted this on April 2, 2008.