vanesch said:
Hey, thanks, that was exactly my question in my previous post...
Sorry for not responding to you directly, vanesch. Pervect had pretty much made all the points I was going to bring up.
ubavontuba said:
Okay, so let's say that it'd take 10 billion years for one nano black hole to eat the earth.
10 billion years is near the physical lower limit of what's
possible (by the Eddington limit), but I wouldn't say it's probable.
How much time for 1,000 nano black holes? How about 100,000? A million?
Not much shorter. Remember, we're talking about exponential growth in the limiting case, so the limiting timescale will shrink only logarithmically with the number of black holes created.
It's also good to keep in mind all of the qualifications that go into these limiting calculations:
1. The black holes don't Hawking radiate away -- Given that a similar effect (the Casimir effect) has been experimentally confirmed, I don't think there's a great deal of skepticism about Hawking radiation in the physics community. Hawking radiation also lies within a regime in which most folks trust both GR and QFT.
2. The LHC would have to actually
create black holes -- It's only a couple very exotic theories that predict any black hole creation at these laboratories. Mainstream theory predicts that we are a long way from the energy scale needed to create black holes (~10
19 GeV).
3. The black holes would have to remain bound to the Earth -- This should only be the case with those created right at threshold, a small fraction of the total.
4. The black holes don't disappear upon interaction with other particles- - Since we don't have a reliable theory of quantum gravity, there's no reason to assume that micro black holes will stick around after creation.
5. The micro black holes will accrete rapidly -- Again, there's little we can do to address this question without QG.
If this is your idea of dangerous, then I think I should invest in your insurance provider.