GLOBAL WARMING AND BLACK HOLES: THE PARANOIA CONNECTION

That the Farmer's Almanac is now predicting global cooling is a pretty good indication that the glo-warming hysteria is coming to an end.  The "warming crisis" the media has incessantly tried to shove down people's throats is of little concern to voters.  All polls show it is at or near the bottom of voter concerns, and it is rarely addressed by politicians seeking their votes.

Which may help to explain the media's current attempt at paranoia-mongering:  spreading fears that the entire earth may be swallowed up by a man-made black hole in Switzerland.

A fundamental law of physics is the Conservation of Energy – that the total amount of energy in a system remains constant;  it's neither increased nor decreased, but is transferred from one form to another.

Evolution seems to have hard-wired paranoia into the human brain so that something similar may be going on in systems of human societies.  Ever since we've been Homo sapiens, even when we were Homo erectus, for two million years if we weren't paranoid, we were some predator's dinner.

Getting eaten by a giant cave bear or saber-tooth tiger is an efficient way to remove the non-paranoid from the gene pool.

The genetically hard-wired need to be scared of something means if one fear goes away, we'll quickly find a replacement.  Even if we have to make it up.

The Soviet Union was a real – very real – threat to America, Europe, and the entire world.  Once the threat of nuclear annihilation went away with the end of the Soviet state, it didn't take long for another threat to Planet Earth and all civilization to replace it:  global warming.

Paranoia had to be conserved.

With the dissipation of glo-warm fear, paranoia will now seek other outlets.  The scientific illiteracy of so many folks, combined with the power that scientific technology holds over their lives, means that irrational and ignorant fears regarding science may become commonplace.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva is the largest and most complex machine ever built.  Physicists hope to simulate the conditions of the "Big Bang" that created the universe.  Such a simulation, the worry goes, could create a tiny black hole that could suck in nearby matter, growing with incredible speed and size until it sucked in and destroyed our entire planet.

Here are two reasons why the paranoia is misplaced and will have to wander off to find another target.

First is that the earth is bombarded every day with cosmic rays that have ten orders of magnitude (that's ten zeroes) more energy than the LHC can produce.  Most cosmic rays don't have that energy level, but some do – and in 4.5 billion years of the earth's existence, none has managed to turn the earth into a black hole.

Second, the Hawking Radiation equations specify that the larger a black hole is, the less it will give off radiation and the more energy and mass it will absorb;  the smaller a black hole, the more radiation it will give off and the less matter it will absorb.

The smaller the black hole, the smaller its lifespan, as it will "evaporate."

While it is quite unlikely the LHC will create a microscopic black hole in the first place, if it were to do so, it could not travel more than one foot per nanosecond (one-billionth of a second), the speed of light.  The lifetime of an LHC micro black hole would be at the most one or two nanoseconds.

The only matter with which a micro black hole could interact in the vacuum chamber of the LHC is the wall of the chamber itself.  There would be no time for it to travel several feet to reach the wall before it disappears.

So we can be quite confident that science will not create a black hole that swallows the wall of the chamber, then the chamber, then Geneva, then the earth.  And we can also be confident that paranoiacs will find something else on which to focus their fears, aided and hyped by the media.  Be on the watch for it.