I'm scared! What could go wrong with the LHC when it is turned on in 19 days?

Question

I'm scared! What could go wrong with the LHC when it is turned on in 19 days?

Answer 1

LHC will not kill us.

Even if they succeed in creating tiny (microscopic Black Hole) they will (a) not suck in everything around us and (b) evaporate rapidly.

Consider this: If the sun were replace by a black hole of the same mass, the gravitational pull on the earth would NOT change, we would continue to orbit. Granted the lack of light would present a few problems, but we would not be sucked in.

Answer 2

The Coming Lie:

"Oh no! The LHC opened a "doorway" for aliens to come through!"

Will you fall for it is the question?

Remember that H.G. Wells wrote not only THE WAR OF THE WORLDS but also the horrendous work called NEW WORLD ORDER.

Answer 3

Relax conner, nothing bad will happen.

(Theres much better things to worry about)

Answer 4

So what's the problem?  People who believe that the LHC is going to generate a black hole which will consume the earth also believe in the imaginary planet Nibiru coming by in 4 years and destroying Earth.  So if the LHC people s***w up and create a tear in the space-time continuum, you'll be dead just a little sooner, and probably a lot quicker.  This sounds like a good deal!!!  I would suggest you send them a nice note of appreciation for killing you in such a humane manner.  

Answer 5

Connor, what will happen in the LHC is what has happened from the beginning of time with cosmic rays billion of times and at a much larger scale. We have nothing to fear but that the experiment won't show us any interesting results, like the Higgs boson.

Beside that, the accelerator is already in use in an experimental way since the 8th of August and ... we are still here! :-)

Answer 6

It could fail to work and end up as a very expensive piece of junk. That's all that can go wrong.

Answer 7

Lots of things can and will go wrong, but none of them are dangerous.

If the LHC can create a black hole, then so can cosmic rays, which have considerably more energy, and strike the Earth all the time.  Several have passed through your body while you read this.  If cosmic rays can create black holes, they have already done so in your body.  The Earth is still here, therefore, the LHC will not destroy the Earth.

Answer 8

We're going to die.

I really wanted to live to be 18 but oh well.

=/

Answer 9

It blows a fuse and the janitor has to look if he has a fitting replacement. This will cause him to become very frustrated and maybe have a stress-induced argument with his wife. Which in turn might cause a divorce, psychologically impaired children... and finally a bag of rice toppling in china.

The LHC does not use much energy - the whole LHC does not contain more energy as a typical fighter bomb.  

Answer 10

For a few years, you'll notice nothing. The black hole that is made will fall into the Earth and oscillate from one side to the other for a while, but eventually it will settle down at the center and start sucking down the matter of our planet. But people on the surface won't notice anything right away. But several years later there will be some serious earthquakes, as upper material falls downward to take the place of what the black hole swallowed. And, of course, we will fall along with the Earth's crust, until we're toes-on the black hole itself. We'll probably be crushed or incinerated along the way, before the black hole can spaghettify our bodies.

Sorry, I was just doomsmongering. Probably nothing bad will happen. Most likely. Maybe.

Boo.

Answer 11

It's just science. The thing that has brought us wonders like Napalm, T-n-T, nuclear bombs, aspartame, MSG, DDT, etc.

Answer 12

The worst thing is that it wouldn't work....  Or, they find *exactly* what they were expecting - imagine a research project that doesn't generate any new ideas or questions....  that would be sad.

Answer 13

Clearer heads are trying to stop it-

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2...

Look what happened last year-

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=part...

Answer 14

a change in human consciousness. After the LHC is turned on that is.....

Answer 15

Two things can scare humans.

One is ignorance (afraid of what we don't understand).

The other is knowledge that something can go wrong.

For now, those who know how the LHC should work, are only scared that the thing may turn out to be a flop -- that it will not perform the way it is intended to.

We are also aware that there are people trying to scare others with the idea of black holes swallowing Earth.

IF the LHC does create a black hole, then that black hole will evaporate so fast that we will not even be able to detect it directly.  We will be stuck with having to infer its very brief existence from the type of radiation that will be given off when it evaporates.

that is, of course IF such black holes can exist.

Classical black holes are made when enough matter is brought together to form an object where the escape speed exceed the speed of light.  If you had the entire mass of the Sun and if you could shrink it down to a 3 km ball, then you'd have a black hole.  Obviously, the LHC cannot do that (for starters, the LHC weighs a lot less than the Sun).

The type of black hole that COULD (maybe, perhaps) be created is one of energy (for example: at a point, the temperature will exceed the Planck Temperature).

IF the LHC has enough energy to achieve this condition, then this condition must already exist in the universe, since there are cosmic rays with more energy than the LHC.  With the density of cosmic rays that exist, it is certain that collisions of cosmic ray particles can pack more energy than the LHC.  This means that the universe would have had a very large number of these energy black-holes.

The universe still exists.

Either these black holes are not dangerous (meaning: they evaporate before doing anything else) or they don't exist (in which case the LHC will not be able to produce them).

Answer 16

The entire Universe will collapse into the tiny black hole they're about to produce.

...

"Granted, that's a worse case scenario. The destruction might in fact be very localized, limited to merely our own galaxy."

Doc. Emmett Brown

Back to the Future.

Don't be scared millions holes like this hit the Earth every day. But it's impossible to catch one of them.

The LHC is just supposed to produce one at each shoot

Answer 17

In the worst case, a pitiful amount of radiation could leak out, or it could explode, possibly killing some of the workers.

Which is one of the reasons it is buried so deep underground!

Answer 18

max energy of LHC - 7 TeV

energy needed for black hole - 1 220 000 000 000 000 TeV

so yea. if the LHC somehow manages to multiply the power coming to it by a quadrillion, stop the massive surge of energy from frying every component of it, then harness that energy in a coherent way even though it really has no way of handling that energy, then breaks the laws of physics by having the newly create black hole last longer than a nanosecond, and then repeats that process septillions of times to create a black hole that actually has measurable gravity, then yes the world could possibly end.

am i the only one that thinks that looks impossible?

Answer 19

CANT WAIT !!!!

if it fails a black hole would suck the entire galaxy...that would be worse