Aegix Drakan wrote:I mean, we don't necessarily know if it's fatal to be reduced to microscopic size by a black hole!
A black hole does not reduce anything, so much that it crushes things with incalculable gravitational force. You do not get shrunk when you enter a black hole. You get ripped apart and sucked into a tiny object the size of a pinhead (or smaller), where your molecules will probably forever remain. I don't know how black holes operate when they appear and initially start consuming matter, but from a distance, as I understand it, they tend to turn things into long strangs of molecular spaghetti. I'm pretty sure that's fatal, and maybe even a bit painful.
And if you didn't notice my parenthetical up there, I'll point it out again: black holes are small. Very small. Tiny. They aren't called black galaxies, or black chasms, or black stars. Black holes. As in, a hole in your shirt. Small. If they weren't small, they would not function the way they do. They have their super-strong gravitational pull because they are dinky little things that are packed with matter, usually a star's worth. They become ultra dense and start pulling things with no remorse. Long story short, black holes don't have to be large to be dangerous. In fact, theoretically, black holes would take a tremendous amount of matter to grow even the smallest amount. Galaxies worth.
The way I see it, these mini-black holes aren't dangerous (supposedly) because they're so small, smaller than normal, and don't exist for very long. The same reason man-made super heavy elements (above 108 on the periodic table, I think) are safe (supposedly) to create. They are unstable, and only exist for an almost immeasurably short time, and in such a small window, they usually cannot cause much harm. The risk, however, lies within the snowball effect. If containment fails to work properly, if the mini-black hole exists long enough to gobble up some nearby matter, enough to potentially sustain itself, a chain reaction would start, and life would soon after end in our galaxy. Picture a snowball dropped at the peak of a mountain, only this mountain has no end. There is always a massive blanket of snow to feed the snowball, and the further it falls, the more snow it picks up. The more snow it picks up, the faster if falls, and the faster it picks up the snow.
In reality, the risk is probably about as small as they suggest, provided that the above assumptions are correct, which the are probably not. As I said in my previous post, if this thing is going to be running non-stop for twenty years, it will only take one person to make one mistake during that time to doom our planet.