According to Jonathan Feng, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, to form black holes, the Large Hadron Collider would need to generate many billions of times more energy than it can.
Even if black holes formed, he said, they would be smaller than protons—which fit in the nuclei of atoms—and would evaporate in a miniscule fraction of a second, "long before they could grow by [absorbing] other matter," he wrote.
"Thus, even if black holes are produced at the LHC, they will not annihilate the Earth."
But Feng was willing to lay out his worst-case scenario, he said, "as long as we make it very clear we're going off the deep end."
If a black hole did form and begin eating Earth, there would be no spectacular display, Feng said.
"This tiny little black hole grows little by little and starts eating up the Earth," he said.
"It has to loop back, and it's a little bit like a comet that has an orbit that keeps going through the Earth."
After absorbing the entire Earth—how long it would take is unclear—the black hole would be nearly the size a golf ball but would have the same mass as Earth did before it was gobbled up.
The baby black hole would simply take Earth's place in the solar system, Feng said.
"The moon would be orbiting around this little 'golf ball,' and the other planets would orbit just as they are now," he added.
And even with the most sophisticated of observational techniques, potential intelligent beings in another galaxy would be oblivious to the change.
The lights of Earth would of course be gone, "but the fact is that no one [in another galaxy] can see that anyway," because the illumination is simply too faint for intergalactic detection.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/09/080909-black-hole.html
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