What happens when science goes wrong, and humankind’s technological hubris
causes global calamity? Usually, the credits roll, these types of scenarios
are almost always science fiction. But, since it’s
black hole week
at NASA, we thought we’d have a little fun imagining the complete and
accidental annihilation of our planet.
Back in the 1930s, there was a
brief moment
when some of the physicists working with Einstein on the atom bomb stopped
to wonder if exploding such a device would end up lighting the Earth’s
atmosphere on fire and destroying the entire planet.
The team did some quick math and decided it wasn’t likely, and that was the
end of that.
But that didn’t stop some folks in the media from running with the story
after one of the men involved in the conversations shared it as an anecdote
to the press.
Today, more than 80 years later, it’s not uncommon to come across hyperbolic
re-tellings of the story that involve zero-hour panic and last-second
prayers.
The same thing happened when the Large Hadron Collider went online back in
2008. Scientists
stoked the media’s curiosity
by positing the lab’s potential ability to create microscopic black holes.
Could these black holes destroy the planet? Are we in trouble?
Of course, the answer to those questions was and remains a very strong:
almost certainly not. Maybe the LHC will eventually create microscopic black
holes and maybe it won’t. What’s important here is that, theoretically
speaking, if it does, then that would indicate that microscopic black holes
are more common than predicted.
As
this article from Forbes
points out, we live with bigger threats in our solar system than the LHC is
likely to produce and there are probably tiny black holes all over the place
anyway:
Sure, we’ve never created particles of this energy in a laboratory setting before. But at the very highest of energies — energies more than a hundred million (100,000,000) times greater than what we create at the LHC — particles smack into Earth constantly: the great cosmic rays that bombard us from all directions in space.
These black holes, if they exist, would have been bombarding Earth (and all the planets) for the entire history of our Solar System, as well as the Sun, and there is absolutely no evidence that any body in our Solar System ever became a black hole or got eaten by one.
So, there you have it. You have almost nothing to fear from black holes. Of
course, “almost” nothing isn’t the same as absolutely nothing. And that
means, theoretically speaking, there’s at least a greater-than-zero-percent
chance that scientists could accidentally create a dangerous black hole in a
laboratory.
The most commonly-cited reason why the LHC is unlikely to produce a
dangerous black hole is that it
doesn’t have enough power. But what if we imagine a super large collider capable of generating a
dangerous amount of power?
Scientists currently use
black hole analogs
to study quantum gravitational effects. Unfortunately for our purposes,
these usually involve lasers, cold atoms, and weird metals.
The experiments are super cool, and they’re giving physicists incredible new
insight into our universe, but they’re entirely unlikely to produce any sort
of cosmological anomaly or even a baby black hole.
No, if we want to imagine a paradigm where scientists on Earth accidentally
create a black hole large enough to swallow a whole planet (or even the
entire Milky Way!) then we’ll have to think much, much bigger.
Typically, it’s thought that black holes of that size are formed when a big
star collapses in on itself. The star’s mass becomes so densely-packed that
it begins to take on exotic properties.
But a star has to be pretty massive for that to happen. Sol, the star we
refer to as our sun, for example, would more than likely just fizzle out if
it collapsed — it’s just not powerful enough to sustain the necessary
properties for a black hole to emerge.
And that means that scientists would have to screw up so badly in some sort
of endeavor as to create an implosion more powerful than our own sun
collapsing in on itself. It’s difficult to imagine such a thing happening on
our relatively tiny planet — but not impossible.
A cold fusion chain reaction is one possibility. This harkens back to those
not-very-scientific WWII-era concerns about lighting the atmosphere on fire.
The gist is that room-temperature
nuclear fusion could set off a chain reaction
that, rather than exploding to consume the planet, would cause chained
collapses. In essence, this would be like a mini–Big Bang, or many mini-Big
Bangs.
But cold fusion is still hypothetical and there’s no reason to believe it
would be inherently dangerous, which makes it doubly-dubious to suggest its
discovery could immediately precede the eradication of our entire galaxy.
Realistically-speaking, there aren’t many conceivable ways for Earth’s
scientists to do that much damage.
Don’t get me wrong, we’re doing a bang-up job destroying the planet with the
technology we have. But the idea of an innocent experiment at some fancy
research laboratory resulting in the instant obliteration of our planet is a
bit out of our technological grasp at the moment.
Don’t let that get you down though. A hundred years ago, the LHC would have
seemed like science fiction.
With a little luck, and some good old-fashioned human determination, we’ll
be capable of destroying our entire galaxy in no time.
Tags:
Space & Astrophysics