Only 33 days until the Earth is destroyed by a man made black hole?

People love to hear about the end of the world. Strangely, studies show that even when end of the world prophesies do not come true, people's faith in the prophet increases. So, I am predicting that many small black holes will be created by the LHC and that these will eat the earth.

See the source for the count down.

CERN¹ has today announced that the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on 10 September. - cern

Some say the black hole, if it grows out of control, should only swallow France and Switzerland.

Okay people, listen very carefully, because this might well be the most valuable piece of information you will receive -- we are all GOING TO DIE.

And, typically, it's all the fault of those pesky scientists. ... I'm referring, of course, to the CERN project in Switzerland, a pan-European adventure into the heart of particle acceleration. The largest scientific experiment ever conducted, the project has seen the construction of the world's biggest Large Hadron Collider which will produce extremely high-energy collisions between particles of Hadron -- large, fundamental particles largely composed of Quarks -- in a huge, 27 kilometre subterranean circular tunnel which winds its way through France and Switzerland.

The experiment is designed to spin these particles in opposite directions, gathering speed with each circuit of the tunnel before the scientists smash the oncoming particles together at huge speeds, as they search for greater understanding of the inner workings of the particles.

... what's the danger posed by what is a fascinating, if rather baffling, experiment?

Well, the scientists are actually hoping to discover the so-called 'God particle', the Higgs boson, which grants mass to all other particles. Oh, and they will also create a mini-black hole every second during the experiment. And this, not surprisingly, has some people completely freaked out.

Critics of the project are convinced that creating so many black holes in such a confined space could accidentally engineer a perfect storm of black holes, where rather than appearing and disappearing within a micro-second of their creation, they actually start to attach themselves to each other.

Then, gaining cumulative strength and intensity, they would eventually become large enough to be self-sustainable and then, of course, they would expand, first sucking the CERN research facility into the abyss before ultimately gaining exponential strength and devouring the entire world.

Of course, the fact that you're reading this on a Monday morning means the prospect of the entire world being sucked into a black hole might not seem such a distressing idea. - independent

Large black holes evaporate when they get too big (five solar masses?). They give off heat, x-rays and gamma rays. If our solar system were in the path of a black hole's gamma rays, it could be bad news for life. According to HowStuffWorks, a large enough gamma ray burst (GRB) could superheat the atmosphere and obliterate the ozone layer, destroying almost every living thing on the planet. If a burst from a source (say a star 6,000 light years away) lasted 20 seconds, some of the only survivors would be deep sea creatures because the water would provide some shielding from the sun's radiation. Luckily, all GRB's we've observed are at least 2 billion light years away.

Until next month the nearest black hole (2000, space.com) is V 4641, part of a micro-quasar between 3 to 10 solar masses at a paltry 1,600 light-years from Earth on the way to the center of the Milky Way in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. Recall that a light-year is 5.88 trillion miles.

Next month, in Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN begins operation. If we are lucky, it will create micro black-holes and confirm Hawking Radiation and the existence of several other sub-atomic particles and move us closer towards unifying quantum theory and relativity, and explaining everything. If we aren't so lucky (because Hawking was incorrect), it will create micro black-holes which will combine, and survive long enough to start sucking in nearby matter, leading to a chain reaction which devoures the whole Earth. But that probably won't happen so there is no need to worry about it....

Nearest black-hole? In a month or so, possibly just a few thousand miles away, for a pico-second or so. - PrinceGaz