http://www.misunderstooduniverse.com/Franc...day_Machine.htm

It's not just France, many nations, including the USA, are collaborating on this. Be sure to view the movie. Clicking the "Start" button launches a movie viewer browser window.

Interesting story but as someone pointed out in the thread at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2004-07/msg0062316.html ,

Consider that cosmic rays would have been doing this
for *billions* of years, in fact, throughout the
existence of the Earth even during its formation from
its primordial cloud of material. Jupiter has been an
even larger target for just as long or longer.

See Responses A and B to Defense 1 in the originally linked Web page. For cosmic rays to duplicate the conditions at CERN, two heavy (gold or lead nuclei) cosmic rays would have to collide head on. Collisions against the atmospere (or iron in the surface of moon) do not have nearly the center-of-mass (COM) energy and the collision products are traveling at near-light speed.

The bottom line is that a disaster secnario cannot be rulled out. It has a nonzero probability of occurrence, for now. I would love to see a proof that it could not happen. I might worry less then. What makes this disaster scenario exceptional is that it leads not to the end of humankind, but to the end of all life and the Earth itself.

See http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/prob.htm for more discussion of the problem.

"All" life? Extraterrestrial life has a:

Perhaps I should have said "the end of all known life." Extraterrestrial life has a very small probability of discovery. SETI is in the process of proving that they aren't out there. Of course, my assertion is falsifiable.

SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a scientific effort aiming to determine if there is intelligent life out in the universe. Most known life is not intelligent (esp in the sense that it would be able to transmit EMR or laser signals). So extraterrestrial life of the more fundamental type is more likely.

But back to the topic. Rick, you're more aligned to this topic that many of us. Is there really a risk (statistical, perceived, whichever) that this instrument could produce an uncontrollable black hole that might be more than a local danger?

Short answer: yes.

For the risk to be acceptable, the probability of an earth-consuming disaster must be smaller than 10^-18 (ten to the minus 18th power). That is based on the value of the earth for the next 100 million years calculated from the current annual gross world product in dollars. 100 million years is the assumed useful lifetime of the Earth based on projected solar life (the sun will start to become a red giant around that time).

However, nobody has been able to calculate the actual probability of disaster, but it has been shown to be nonzero. This is an unacceptable situation for starting up that machine.

Risk, measured in dollars (or Euros) is the product of the probability of the undesired outcome and the cost of the undesired outcome. This measure indicates how much to reasonably spend to assure the outcome does not occur. So far the studies done by physicists to address this concern cost less than a million dollars.

But the type of research that this instrument would facilitate has enormous potential benefits to humankind ( http://www.lhc.ac.uk/ ). How might the risk be removed (realizing that almost very R&D endeavour has risk) or what alternative methods could be used to provide the same/similar scientific progress?

It is often pointed out that this type of research might lead to a star drive that will make travel to the stars possible, or research might lead to knowledge that will make cheap abundant non-polluting fusion power possible. But those possible (but not certain) benefits need to be weighed against the possible cost of loss of the entire planet.

Lots of people have a vested interest in seeing the collider project become operational, and they often cite the fact that all human activity has risks. However, only the collider risk has the potential to destroy the entire planet. This exceptional risk needs exceptional mitigation activity. That is, we need a comprehensive study to prove the probability is so near zero as to be a non-worry.

It's in the hands of a judge now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/science/...i=5070&emc=eta1

(New York Times article)

If a black hole were to form, which seems to be what we are worried about right? Wouldnt, do to its extreamly low mass just cause it to evaporate?

"Because Hawking radiation allows black holes to lose mass, black holes which lose more matter than they gain through other means are expected to evaporate, shrink, and ultimately vanish. Smaller 'micro' black holes [MBHs] are currently predicted by theory to be larger net emitters of radiation than larger black holes, and to shrink and evaporate faster."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation


"So, for instance, a 1 second-lived black hole has a mass of 2.28 × 105 kg, equivalent to an energy of 2.05 × 1022 J that could be released by 5 × 106 megatons of TNT. The initial power is 6.84 × 1021 W."

For what they are doing, 2.28 × 105 kg is a huge amount!

That's one of the safety factors cited by CERN, but recently two scientific papers have cast doubt on the existence of Hawking radiation, which has never been observed. Hawking radiation is theoretical and contradicts Einstein's universal gravitation. Relying on that for safety is not fully satisfactory.