> > Really, the idea of testing Big Bang conditions is nice, but can't we wait a while and perform the planet-threatening experiments somewhere else? A station on a large asteroid or something, I think I could live with. BUT--well, I suppose I could rant on for a page or ten about humanity's folly and impatience, but I don't think I need to.
> >

> i wouldn't even want it on an asteroid. . not one close enough to us that we could monitor the data anyway. . . if we go out to the mid-solar system asteroid belt and create a black hole, the earth still gets sucked in.

I don't think so. Any artificial black hole would be initially very small, and even if it ate everything in the asteroid belt, it wouldn't have more mass than the combined mass of all of those asteroids, which isn't a whole lot, as the biggest of them are only a few hundred kilometers in diameter. (Ceres, the biggest is 940km, Pallas, the next-biggest is only 540km, and the vast majority are merely large rocks.)

Black holes only act like black holes in their immediate vicinity; from a distance they are as harmless as any massive thing. So out there a black hole couldn't suck us in, and even the collection of the belt's mass into one place couldn't perturb our orbit significantly.

Even so, it needn't be in the belt. In could be in one of the minor asteriod groups like the Trojans that preceed and follow Jupiter in it's orbit, or on Pluto, or, if you wanted to be as safe as you could be and not leave the solar system completely, how about a station 60 degrees ahead of Pluto in it's orbit.

That solves the problem of black holes gobbling up Earth, but there were still those tantalizing (and scary!) references to "strangelets" and "universal perturbations" (or somesuch)... anyone else get the feeling that we're orangutans playing with atom bombs?


Kw"the moment I think I know something about something..."irq