My uncle (a far nerdier nerd than I) sent me this link (http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html) describing why the human race doesn’t have to worry (whew!) about being consumed by a black hole created at the new Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator.

And it got me thinking about exactly what would happen if they were wrong, and a tiny black hole was created. Would we all get sucked in instantaneously? Would it just fall to the center of the earth, consuming magma as it went, until the earth collapsed from the inside out? Would lack of friction cause it to oscillate back and forth around the earth’s gravitational center, gaining momentum as it picked up more mass, until it had reduced the earth to swiss-cheese writ-large? Would it accelerate right on through and shoot out the other size never to be seen again? (That is figuratively speaking, of course. We never would have seen it to begin with since light can’t escape from those little suckers.)

Turns out (according to my uncle) that any black hole created at the LHC accelerator would be so small that it’d evaporate via Hawkings radiation in 10^-30 seconds… in other words, instantaneously. We’d only even know it ever existed by virtue of the radiation it left behind.

He also said that one big enough to NOT evaporate immediately, say, 1mm across, would cut through the planet like butter, and that something bigger would eat us up in short order. Turns out a black hole with a mass equivalent to that of the Earth would have an event horizon that’s only about 9mm across. Not exactly the huge gaping maw that I’d started visualizing for my next Sci-Fi blockbuster movie.

So, in summary, Stevie was right about not asking.