The end of the world...IS TOMORROW?!

:truit: alas you have seen through my charade.
bravo.

Bruno, you always crack me up

Eyelids: say what?

nope, the odds are actually higher than those of a stable black hole showing up. nuclear power plants are based on fission, which requires way less energy than fusion. in fact, there’s no such a thing as fusion power plant because we don’t have the technology to even deal with the ammount of energy released by industry-scale fusion.

the LHC is basically a big machine that produces a very tiny fusion reaction and tries to videotape it. there’s a twist: its cooling system is actually fuel for a much higher-scale fusion reaction, and on top of that, the power produced by the particular fusion done in the LHC is of a scale much, much higher than what we could ever dream for a fusion-based power plant. and, like i said before, there’s no known technology to deal with this kind of reaction: the self-sustained fission process we can produce today is of the “bomb” kind, never of the “power plant” kind.

your sources are right.

Right, it takes a while for it to be fully ready to go. Today just started the process.

If it does engulf the earth, none of us would even know. Doesn’t sound like a bad way to go right? I’d say it’s better than any other possible way, so I say, LET’S GO BLACK HOLE!

Well, now that my/everyones hype about doomsday is down-ish…I wonder what they learned from it? I’ve always liked science so I want to know more! :happy:

I usually don’t have time to come on the computer to research with starting highschool and all. And the homework… :bored:

to be sure:

Bruno you’ve been tearing an intellectual new one into everyone on this topic.

-claps-

Btw, If we are going to die, it won’t happen until they do some actual collisions in the lhc. (on Oct. 21?)

Actually, they predict it could take around 50 months for the man made black hole to stablise, grow and then suck in the earth.

Carnun: so you say it could be out there, right now? how exciting!

Much talk about something that hasnt happened. I do not know how you find these sources, but there is no risk for the earth to be eaten. A black hole doesnt grow like this: :wolfbite: (the left head is the hole, the right one earth), it takes time, and besides the holes are WAY too weak to eat the machine, so you can just :puh: on LHC. And thats it :razz:

Still I do not understand the reason why this He from the magnets should start the fusion process. Ok theoretically every light element since iron 56 can undergo fusion reaction but practically heavyer product than helium are rare even in star reactions (exept supernova).

In H-bomb the He is the product not a fuel.

wikipedia: “criteria & candidates for terrestrial [fusion] reactions”.

↑ nope, He can also be used in fusion reactions.

Some calculation estimates that it might take 50 months to 50 years for a stabilized black hole to grow big enough to tear us up big time. Life would suck for a long time in other words.
We shouldn’t forget the hypothetical strangelets, though o_O
Imagine the earth as a pile of strange matter :eek:

Someone at school mentioned that she found it funny that some claimed a micro black hole to spend around 50 months to become big enough, as that’s about 4 years from now. Will we bring 2012 upon ourselves? :woo: :eek:

But I think I’ll just trust Hawking on this one.

I also metnioned that if I sayd except iron 56. But look at the table in your link and you will see that where is no reaction presented there He 4 is a reactant (fuel). It is alway a product. So making a nuclear bomb from He 4 is not the easiest thing :smile:

The case would be different if they use He 3 for cooling (physicists sometimes do that), but its much more expensive and I do not see the reason for that in this system.

I still exculde this H-bomb danger.

:eh: Carnun rereads his post… Nope Bruno, I did not say or suggest such things. As has already been posted the first collision is still to take place some time in mid October.

According to a newspaper in the town i live in, there were reports of 14-year olds coming to their school crying about the world going under.

Some panic from the “old” schoolstudents, right, or do they know about this?

were you among them? ;p anyhow, tell your colleagues they needn’t worry: they can keep track of doomsday online (rss feed available), and should there be any reason for them to freak out and go live life like there was no tomorrow, they’ll be told in advance. :slight_smile:

I doubt that. The rate would be constantly accelerating, I’d imagine once it gets some ground it’d get going very fast. It’s a black hole after all.

Four to seven minutes has got to be too much.

alright, first off: i was joking. no really, half my posts in this topic aren’t serious, mainly because i myself can’t take doomsday seriously — i’m not saying i don’t believe in doomsday, i just can’t take it seriously.

that being said, and now in all seriousness, you might be right: four to seven minutes can be too much. they can also be way too little: a black hole can take years to consume a planet the size of Earth. here’s a quick explanation of what a black hole is: it’s a point (as in “a zero-size body”) called singularity with a preposterous quantity mass. if you were to do it old school and calculate its density as mass over volume, you’d find out its mass is infinite, which under old school gravitation laws would mean singularities are quickly swallowing the universe.

lucky for us that theory has been proved wrong already. what happens with singularities is, their mass will create a (really strong) gravitational force. things will be attracted to the singularity. and there’s some point, which varies greatly depending on the mass of the singularity, at which there’s no return. there’s this distance from singularities which we call “event horizons”, explaining exactly what they mean is quite dull, but it works for now to ask you to think that whatever gets closer to the singularity than that distance has no coming back.

that weird system made of a bodiless point, the singularity, and its influence zone within the event horizon, is what we call a black hole. right. so what is the size of a baby black hole? honestly, i’ve no freaking idea. but here’s an interesting figure: the minimum mass for a primordial black hole (i.e. one originated at the Big Bang) seems to be 1 000 000 000 000 kg (= 2 200 000 000 000 pounds). it would take 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years for one such baby black hole to swalow the whole Earth. (which i suspect is longer than the Earth will live, anyway, and at any rate long enough for you not to care).

for more information: great article on Universe Today, and then some more. :wink: