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Comment by bauruine | Hacker News Reader

>I'd expect us all to be dead almost instantly

Not an expert at all but from what I've read you'd expect wrong. Even if they could create a black hole out of the Matterhorn it would be so small, less than a hydrogen atom, that it doesn't interact much with anything.

"Even though a microscopic black hole might contain the mass of a mountain, it would experience almost no friction as it passed through regular matter. It would fall through regular material as if it wasn’t there." [0]

So the worst thing would be the missing Matterhorn which pretty sure would upset the Swiss.

[0]: https://www.universetoday.com/1930/are-microscopic-black-hol...

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You're leaving out evaporation. A black hole with the mass of a mountain would evaporate on the order of a second.

That would also release energy the equivalent of ~20M megatons of TNT, which is half a million times that of Tsar Bomba and around that of the KT event. The Swiss wouldn't be too upset about anything.

So… would it fall to the center of the Earth? At that point could it start consuming matter? I have to admit I’m very ignorant of how a small black hole could grow (or not).

Not saying I believe the LHC can make those or anything, just intrigued by the questions.

It’s so small at that point it begins to act a little like a white hole (Hawking radiation iirc?) and evaporates quickly. It’s surprisingly difficult for matter to cross an event horizon.

Edit-actually having a small black hole would unlock some truly sci-fi sounding tech. Like the fastest interstellar travel, seemingly unlimited power, etc.

If they manage to create one with almost no velocity, it would keep falling through the Earth, down, up and down again, for either something between atoseconds or centuries, until it either explodes or hits enough matter to get big enough to matter.

Or, more realistically (as realistic as we can be talking about the LHC creating black holes, AKA, not realistic at all), it will be launched into space in some random direction.

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