Scientific Experiment Could Destroy The Earth - Or maybe not

Don't these people read sci-fi?

In Stephen King's short story The Mist, the military conducted an experiment to see if they could open a window on a parallel universe. Unfortunately, they opened a door, letting through all manner of nasty creatures that set off across the country-side, wreaking havoc as they terrorized the townsfolk.

This August, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will turn on the Large Hadron Collider and we may all end up running for our lives, screaming in terror.

Ok, it's unlikely. Physicist Martin Rees estimates the probability of a global catastrophe is only one in 50 million. But, hey, who wants to take the chance?

The particle accelerator, which costs about 3 billion Euros, is a 27 kilometer long ring of super-cooled magnets buried about 100 meters beneath the French/Swiss border. It will produce two counter rotating beams of protons, slamming them into each other at 99.999999% of the speed of light. In this way scientists hope to recreate conditions that may have existed a fraction of a second after the big bang.

There's just one problem: Black holes.

It's possible that the collider will create black holes which, as everyone knows, really suck. Large black holes have such tremendous gravitational fields they're able to pull in and trap light, planets, and even entire stars.

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking warns that "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."

The scientists constructing the LHC, however, are confident that any black holes created would be tiny micro holes that would evaporate almost immediately into a harmless shower of particles. The device simply doesn't have the power to create the big killer black holes that really ruin a long weekend.

But what if the black holes they create are more stable than they anticipate? They could begin absorbing everything around them, growing more dense and more massive, absorbing more, growing more, in a vicious cycle that would see the earth, and likely our entire star system, annihilated.

At this point, we should call attention to two outstanding facts ...

First, extraterrestrials rarely visit Earth. Sure, the occasional airline pilot or beet farmer sees UFOs, but there's nowhere near the level of traffic we'd expect from a galaxy with a hundred billion stars.

Second, astronomers theorize that black holes are quite common, even in our own galaxy.

Could these two facts be related? Could it be that we don't see heavy interstellar traffic because, as those civilizations advanced they built their own particle accelerators and accidently destroyed themselves with their own home-made black holes?

Just a thought.