We Are All Going to Die

[Miasma]

I don't care if they're crackpots, crackpots are about due to be right anytime soon.  I hope after reading this you're just as terrified as I am.

March 29, 2008
Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More
By DENNIS OVERBYE

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Mr. Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up.” CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Mr. Gillies said.

“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6.

“Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he said.

But Mr. 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.”

In an e-mail message, Mr. Wagner called the CERN safety review “fundamentally flawed” and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates the European Commission’s standards for adhering to the “Precautionary Principle,” he wrote, “and has not been done by ‘arms length’ scientists.”

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

This is not the first time around for Mr. Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000.

Mr. Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration.

Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said.

Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history of physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion would set the atmosphere on fire.

The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.”

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes would probably not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of so-called quantum gravity might appear.

As part of the safety assessment report, Dr. Mangano and Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the last few months on a paper exploring all the possibilities of these fearsome black holes. They think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings until they have been peer reviewed, Dr. Mangano said.

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Dragons motherfuckers, Dragons.  Eating us up.  God help us all.

[JWIV]

I don't care if they're crackpots, crackpots are about due to be right anytime soon. 
Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Dragons motherfuckers, Dragons.  Eating us up.  God help us all.
[/quote]

Time to get St. George on speed dial then.

[Murgos]

Dragons motherfuckers, Dragons.  Eating us up.  God help us all.

Time to get St. George on speed dial then.

Matthew McConaughey

[Lantyssa]

It's far more likely to open a dimensional rift where aliens come spewing forth to enslave us all.

[Murgos]

But what if those aliens look like FIRE BREATHING DRAGONS???  Eh, what then miss smarty-pants?  What then!!!

[Strazos]

What if those aliens are also hot females humanoids? And blue?!

[Samwise]

I think Strazos has just proved beyond any doubt why we can't reasonably NOT continue with these experiments.

[Abagadro]

Heh, this was the plot of Jack McDevitt's last book only on a larger scale. Aliens showed up and destroyed the collider that was about to tear a hole in the universe.

[IainC]

The RHIC Speculative Disaster Scenario briefing.

If you're interested in this sort of thing then you may also find this site interesting.

[Venkman]

No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

Last I heard, no one's actually seen a black hole at all (though folks seem to know pretty well how to detect them and where they might appear).

What'd happen if a black hole sucked up just Switzerland and the south-eastern part of France (which, iirc, the LHC goes under a bit of), taking land mass, atmosphere and whatnot with it?

[stu]

I dunno. Death by Black Hole is pretty hardcore. 

And didn't Hellboy come from one of those? Totally worth the risk. Honestly, I've had enough alien princesses and space pirates in my life. A black hole would be a positive change.  =^.^=

[Abagadro]

No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

Last I heard, no one's actually seen a black hole at all (though folks seem to know pretty well how to detect them and where they might appear).

What'd happen if a black hole sucked up just Switzerland and the south-eastern part of France (which, iirc, the LHC goes under a bit of), taking land mass, atmosphere and whatnot with it?

In Dan Simon's Illium/Olympos that is what happened to Paris I believe.

Just keeping up with my theme.

[ahoythematey]

As I understand it, black holes are formed in the aftermath of dying supergiants.  How the fuck could a little collider built on earth hope to produce something that could in any way endanger us like that?  We probably have a higher chance of all being fried from a bad sunflare.

[stu]

The scientists admitted that it was "a bit of a gamble," but they needed extra resolution for the analysis. Dr. Gordon Freeman was the scientist responsible for inserting the sample for analysis. As Freeman was preparing to do so, one of the overseeing scientists noticed a small discrepancy in the readings, but dismissed it as "well within acceptable bounds again".

P.S. Deep down, I hope this happens, because I'm getting tired of my current job.

[Phildo]

Quaid, start the reactor!

[Numtini]

"that would be bad"

[Lantyssa]

I doubt any experiment is going to be able to compact a sizable enough mass into a small enough volume to get the densities sufficient to start sucking in any matter around it.  The event horizon for such a minuscule singularity (if it could even form) would be so small as to have trouble interacting with nearby particles.  It'd probably expell all its energy and explode before reaching a critical mass.  I wouldn't want to be in the room due to the high energies and radiation associated with such an event, but it won't destroy the world.

[Aez]

[Miasma]

I doubt any experiment is going to be able to compact a sizable enough mass into a small enough volume to get the densities sufficient to start sucking in any matter around it.  The event horizon for such a minuscule singularity (if it could even form) would be so small as to have trouble interacting with nearby particles.  It'd probably expell all its energy and explode before reaching a critical mass.  I wouldn't want to be in the room due to the high energies and radiation associated with such an event, but it won't destroy the world.

I don't know, if you had told me in 1941 that in ten years we'd be able to make mini suns on earth capable of levelling cities I'd have laughed at you...

[JWIV]

[Johny Cee]

Quaid, start the reactor!

Consider dis a divorce!

[NiX]

I'm thinking we get pictures of all the scientists involved with this. If any of them happen to look like Gordon we club him to death with crowbars. Whether or not he has anything to do with the actual process itself or not.

[WindupAtheist]

In the sort of scenario they describe, wouldn't the singularity eat into the ground and eventually come to rest at the Earth's center of gravity?  Whereupon it would presumably proceed to hollow out the planet, leaving us to die in gigantic worldwide earthquakes as the crust collapses inward?

God, this is such a cool way to die.  Let's go for it.

[IainC]

In the sort of scenario they describe, wouldn't the singularity eat into the ground and eventually come to rest at the Earth's center of gravity?  Whereupon it would presumably proceed to hollow out the planet, leaving us to die in gigantic worldwide earthquakes as the crust collapses inward?

God, this is such a cool way to die.  Let's go for it.

Method No. 3 from my link above.

Sucked into a microscopic black hole

You will need: a microscopic black hole.

Note that black holes are not eternal, they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore your microscopic black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of Mount Everest.

Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the centre of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.

Earth's final resting place: a singularity with a radius of about nine millimetres, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.

Feasibility rating: 3/10. Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.

Comments: Getting closer!

Source: The Dark Side Of The Sun, by Terry Pratchett. It is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time, he was my original source for the idea, so that's what I'm putting.

[Venkman]

about nine millimetres,

Man, think of the property values then. Lex Luthor's building another worldmap even as we speak!

Funny thing about these potential events is like the Manhatten Project, they're all events there's absolutely nothing we could do about even if we knew they were coming. How do you "stuff" a black hole?

[Lantyssa]

Starve a Black Hole.  Feed a Nebula.

Note the required mass in Iain's example.  I would be surprised if they can get the necessary density with just a few nuclei, much less that much matter.  This is going to be as eventful as Y2K.

[Miasma]

The problem with all the science you guys are throwing around is that the entire reason for building this giant thing is that we don't really know what happens - that's why we're building the collider.  You can't cite current theories in physics to prove a device's safety when it's that selfsame device that is meant to actually prove/disprove those very theories, when it comes right down to it we have no idea what will happen.  We're building this thing to try and learn more about the origins of our world going all the way back to the big bang, I really don't think it's worth even a minuscule chance of destroying the world to do that.

[IainC]

Not really. The science is pretty much known and calculable. We know how much energy is required to create sustainable black holes. Machines like this one and the RHIC are to look closely at what happens when titanic amounts of energy are expended and to see what kind of exotic particles can be generated as a result. Some theories rely on particles we haven't detected yet so these experiments are to see if those particles actually exist or if they're just bad predictions from wrong theories. Reactions like these happen all the time, all we're doing is bringing them into an environment where we can study them.

[Ravandor]

Note the required mass in Iain's example.  I would be surprised if they can get the necessary density with just a few nuclei, much less that much matter.  This is going to be as eventful as Y2K.

Exactly.  The atomic sized black holes they're trying to make will either evaporate immediately or be so small that their chance of actually interacting with matter at a close enough distance is miniscule.  A black hole with mass of a few gold nuclei (what they typically use in RHIC, last I checked) will have a cross section smaller than a neutrino and will be able to pass through the Earth and oscillate around the core without ever hitting an atom.  It would take so long for the black hole to actually gain enough mass to be dangerous that we'll be more worried about being enveloped in the atmosphere of the red giant sun.

Apologies for interrupting the thread with actual science.

[Llava]

Okay then.  I'll be the first to put down money.

I'm betting $100 against this happening.  I'll give 5:1 odds. 

[Lantyssa]

The best bet is the one where you're not around to pay out if you lose.

[Llava]

The best bet is the one where you're not around to pay out if you lose.

 

[Miasma]

I like the first line of the "Is it safe" section from the collider's own webpage:

What happens when the mass of the black hole eventually becomes extremely small is not quite clear, but the most reasonable guess is that it would disappear completely in a tremendous final burst of emission, equivalent to the explosion of millions of H-bombs. - Hawking

That really put my mind at ease, thanks LHC website!

Then there's the first word of the "Why does this not apply to the LHC?" section: Theory.  So we just have to hope that the Hawking radiation the collider might generate does in fact exist, and if it is just another incorrect theory we might all die in any number of amusing ways.  Which includes dragons.  Fantastic.

[Lantyssa]

The best bet is the one where you're not around to pay out if you lose.

Oops, sorry Llava.  I'll back you with another $100.

[Samwise]

If the theorists who say that there might be a tiny black hole are the same ones who say that a tiny black hole would be very short-lived, I'm not worried.

If somebody has an internally consistent theory that both predicts the formation of a black hole and predicts that it would be dangerous, I might be able to worry a little.  Just a little.