Re: CERN Atom Smasher May End the World

John Park wrote:
> Eivind Kjorstad (eivindorama@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
) writes:
>> Hmm. I'd think that as the hole grows, the mass-input would -stop-
being 
>> pro****tional to the area of the event-horizon, because by the time the 
>> hole has earth mass (and thus earths gravity) the gravity -is- rather 
>> significant.
>>
> True, but that's still going to take a long time. And, in the other 
> direction, there would be bottleneck effects as millions of tonnes of
> hot plasma try to squeeze through a hole a centimetre or so in radius.
I'd
> trust the original analysis to within its quoted error bars. (My own
> guesstimate implied if anything a longer timescale.)

On the other hand, if these things are generated by ultra high energy 
cosmic rays there will likely be a lot more than just one micro hole 
floating around in there. We're getting into some very mushy numbers 
here since we haven't specified what the actual electron volt cutoff for 
black hole formation is, but 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray>
suggests 
we're detecting an UHECR of the highest energy content about once per 
year on Earth (no idea what coverage we're getting but I assume we'd 
only detect a fraction of the ones that hit us). That could translate 
into many millions per year for the Sun, with some unknown percentage of 
them aimed down through the core regions where they might encounter 
enough atoms to slow down and be captured.

I've no ability to put numbers on any of this, just doing my part to 
widen those error bars. :)