DISASTER THURSDAY – ARTIFICIAL BLACK HOLES

Ahh, one of my favorite subjects… the End of the World. Disasters. Armageddon. Not to mention ghosts, the “boogeyman”, things that go *BUMP* in the night… you know, scary shit!!

[Let me explain something. End-of-the-World scenarios don't scare me a bit. It's not comets hitting the Earth, some asswipe terrorist with a suitcase nuke setting it off downtown, the sun exploding, grey goo eating our planet - none of those things. Being covered with very large spiders is way more scary to me.]

My first edition of Disaster Thursday will be about how some of our super-genius scientists are being complete idiots in messing with mother nature once again… creating baby black holes!! You guys know what a black hole is right? It’s an object squeezed down to a single point in space. Down to the ultimate density. Its resulting force of gravity is so strong that nothing escapes the black hole, not even light. It’s been talked about for several years in both science and science fiction groups, and at one time, a laboratory fireball created in a particle accelerator was reportedly supposed to have characteristics of a microscopic black hole. It was created in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Upton, New York.

What was supposedly created radiated heat that was 300 million times hotter than the surface of the sun. It behaved like a black hole, absorbing streams of particles and radiating them as heat. Not that it lasted that long. How about dividing a second by 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000? Pretty short, like a measure of some of my sleep times… anyway.

More than likely, this won’t destroy the Earth. But, by some remote chance one of these things becomes stable. In other words, lasts forever. If one of these cute little cuddly black holes escapes, it will seek the nearest gravity well – that being the planet’s core. That won’t make a difference, but if one can escape, then ten can. So could fifty. There they would collects and combine, and it would catch the occasional particle, over and over. After a while, the planet would get bumpy, then flatten out, and then disappear completely. Of course, this would take many thousands of years to happen, but it could happen.

… just a little something to fall asleep to tonight. Sweet dreams!!

[info: here, and here.]

Black holes are where God divided by zero.
– Stephen Wright