Return of the Large Hadron Collider

[Albedo]

I used to not be able to spell self-replicating universal fabricator, but now (ever since puberty), I are one!

The Moon's mass is THAT MANY meters? Hmm... I'm wondering if that's some form of synesthesia.

The same synaesthetes decided the moon tastes of green cheese, probably.

 

[MargueriteMing]

But wouldn't it eventually suck in earth anyway? If it keeps taking on mass at the moon, it would eventually take on our mass, right?

A low-mass singluarity would have a very sharp gravity gradient, we would be outside of its "suck zone". It wouldn't suck us in, any more than the moon does right now.

 

[Albedo]

Heh, didn't see that. Since i've installed this spell checker, i've noticed that i make a lot more mistakes that aren't typos. I've become to lazy to check the text that's not underlined.
In case anyone's interested: the relevant (because basic) SI unit here is kilograms. (not tons)
Hm, come to think of it, i think that's the only SI unit where the standard has a prefix. Well, i guess that's not going to be corrected anymore.

There's some historical reason for that, one which I am too lazy to look up.

My newest supervillain plan is to kidnap the international prototype kilogram, rendering all modern science useless and forcing civilisation back into the customary unit stone age. Mwahahaha!

Who's going to enforce it? Governments no longer have a monopoly on force if everyone can grow an ICBM in their backyard. (and an anti-ICBM laser)

Duh, under three strikes provisions the DisneyBayerTelmex Nanofabricorp gives you two fair warnings, then they nuke you.

 

[MargueriteMing]

Not very worrying. A sub-nuclear sized black hole would take a loooong time to grow to dangerous proportions. And by looong i mean: "We'll have all the time we need to fix that problem after we stopped our sun going red giant."

Hmm, dunno, two protons smashed together at near teh speed of light might have the mass of 100,000 protons (what is the max energy of teh LHC, anyway?).

If it doubled in mass every hour once it started falling, it wouldn't take that long to grow. As it got bigger, its growth rate would increase, because it would be exerting more force. Plus, pressure inside the earth would force mass against it. Not as strongly as within the sun, where the pressure causes fusion, but probably strong enough to grow the singularity.

And that is assuming Hawking is wrong about black hole evaporation. If he isn't, the thing just pops within a timespan after creation that's just about as short as the time it'd take to swallow the earth is long.

I suspect Hawking is wrong about the mechanism for BHE. I think the gravitational field of a BH perturbs space, which gives rise to spontaneous particle generation. Gravity does work, so it must transmit energy. So, a black hole bleeds energy by the gravitational work it does on other objects, or more likely on the fabric of space itself. All objects do, but it is so small we haven't learned to measure it, because gravity is so weak.

Mass and EMR can't escape a black hole, but gravity does.

Heh, funny picture. Unfortunately though, basic energy conservation prevents gray goo from happening. Which really is unfortunate, because it means that self-replicating universal fabricators don't work either, and those would be wicked cool. And of course, totally anti-capitalistic. Only a pinko commie bastard scientist would build something that'd mean free anything for everyone without paying for it.

Read Prey by Michael Crichton. Nanobots released into the environment haave access to raw materials.

Addendum:
Since black holes are of course denser than normal matter, collapsing an object into a black hole will never affect other objects that were in orbit before.
The Schwarzschild radius is in the area of m*10^-27 meters. The moon only has a mass of 10^22 meters. Even the sun only has about 10^30 kg.

On a totally unrelated note: why the hell does my spell checker suggest "Schwarzenegger" as the correction to "Schwarzschild"?

So, what is the S-radius of the moon? And what is the S-radius of the maximum-energy collision from the LHC?

For that matter, what is the S-radius of a quark or an electron? Could this explain how they are self-sustaining? If so, it would put an upper bound on their physical size.

 

[MargueriteMing]

Not to mention that IP ceases to exist the moment you have von Neumann replicators.
Who's going to enforce it? Governments no longer have a monopoly on force if everyone can grow an ICBM in their backyard. (and an anti-ICBM laser)
Who's going to produce it? You want to *pay* people to develop IP for your company? With what?
Who's going to need it? People who can just grow a couple of supercomputers in their backyard and let them design whatever they want with a few evolutionary algorithms? (and better than any human designer at that)
Basically, von Neumann nanomachines instantly produce a post-scarcity society, which makes all traditional methods of resource allocation obsolete. Even though elements are not transmutable (barring fusion, which would also be theoretically possible) they are in plentiful supply. Given 100% efficiency, we'd have to have a MUCH bigger population than a few billion to have all raw materials that are easily available (i.e. the solar system) in constant use.

On an unrelated note, i'm with the Chinese on the matter of IP law. It only makes sense if it's a give and take situation, but since the Chinese would pretty much be only paying for western patents, and not get any money from the west for Chinese patents, why should they honour it?

That's why we need to insist that they don't censor internet porn, to lower the productivity of their workers.

 

[MargueriteMing]

There's some historical reason for that, one which I am too lazy to look up.

My newest supervillain plan is to kidnap the international prototype kilogram, rendering all modern science useless and forcing civilisation back into the customary unit stone age. Mwahahaha!

Duh, under three strikes provisions the DisneyBayerTelmex Nanofabricorp gives you two fair warnings, then they nuke you.

Ex-girlfriends give you no warning, they just drop payloads of manure on your house.

 

[dpaterso]

Black holes behave like 'normal' objects beyond a certain radius, with the amount of gravitational attraction they exert due to their mass falling by the inverse square of their distance from us. It's only within that radius that they behave like what we normally think of as black holes, pulling everything in. I can't remember the little formula for calculating that radius, but for the mass of the Moon, I don't think it would reach us on Earth.

I bet covert scientific think-tanks phone you at home whenever Earth is in danger.

-Derek

 

[Lhun]

If it doubled in mass every hour once it started falling, it wouldn't take that long to grow.

It doesn't, that's the point.

As it got bigger, its growth rate would increase, because it would be exerting more force.

Of course, it's a function directly linear with the square of mass intake, since the schwarzschild radius increases directly linear to the mass of the black hole. Doubling the mass means doubling the radius which means twice the surface area and twice the mass intake.

Plus, pressure inside the earth would force mass against it. Not as strongly as within the sun, where the pressure causes fusion, but probably strong enough to grow the singularity.

Completely irrelevant here, since a proton-mass black hole has a radius much smaller than a single proton. Unless you have pressure high enough to create neutronium, it doesn't increase the mass density by any remotely relevant factor. Which is the reason why a subatomic black hole grows extremely slowly. It spends all its time, zipping around between nuclei and electrons without ever hitting anything, like an asteroid in a solar system. Until it reaches at least atom-size, the growth rate is seriously frickin slow. The "density" of a black hole is on the order of 10^10 of times higher than the density of an atomic nucleus, let alone an atom. And at first, the thing wouldn't even be able to swallow a nucleus whole. It hits a neutron, and the rest of the nucleus goes pop.

I suspect Hawking is wrong about the mechanism for BHE. I think the gravitational field of a BH perturbs space, which gives rise to spontaneous particle generation. Gravity does work, so it must transmit energy. So, a black hole bleeds energy by the gravitational work it does on other objects, or more likely on the fabric of space itself. All objects do, but it is so small we haven't learned to measure it, because gravity is so weak.

Well how exactly black holes evaporate doesn't matter, as long as they do. If they do, smaller and smaller black holes quickly reach a point where they evaporate faster than they can accumulate mass. If Hawking is correct, that mass is several tons, not a couple of AUs (atomic, not astronomical units). In this case, the last few tons of a black hole would also get converted to energy and particle radiation in a spilt second, like one hell of a nuke. (or antimatter explosion)
If black holes evaporate because of gravity, the size limit for sustainability would need to be calculated, but it would certainly be much, much higher than a subatomic size black hole.

Read Prey by Michael Crichton. Nanobots released into the environment haave access to raw materials.

I'm afraid to say that Michael Crichtons approach to science is about the same as Dan Browns approach to cartography.
The problem with nanobots is that changing molecules around takes energy, and nanobots being really, really small can't very well carry around gas tanks. It's not a problem for von Neumann cybernetics in general, just for it working at a nano scale.

So, what is the S-radius of the moon? And what is the S-radius of the maximum-energy collision from the LHC?

The radius of a black hole with the mass of our moon is around 10^-5 meters. Can't say exactly for the LHC, i don't know what the highest possible resulting mass from a collsion experiment would be. Let's call it a few thousands or tens of thousands of neutron masses. So we'll get a black hole that's ~10^6 times smaller than a single proton.

For that matter, what is the S-radius of a quark or an electron? Could this explain how they are self-sustaining?

I'm not quite sure what you mean. Since neither quarks nor electrons are black holes, i don't know what you mean by them being self-sustaining.

If so, it would put an upper bound on their physical Size.

We have upper bounds for the physical sizes for those. (around 10^-20 meters iirc, +- a few orders of magnitude, quarks are bigger) But those are derived from various experiments.

 

[Diana Hignutt]

Um, yeah, the LHC has never gotten anywhere near full speed, it keeps breaking down, occasionally under bizarre circumstances.

I feel better about Black Holes now, thank you, but what about the manifestation of anti-mater, or the so-called God particle?

Everyone (well, not really) says that the LHC is safe, but if they're wrong and the world gets destroyed, it's not like we can arrest them for being wrong or anything.

I keep forgetting, science always exceeds ignorance and never exceeds ethical morality. Silly me.

Okay, okay, but I'm still willing to bet that if the fears of the LHC (some by notable scientists) are for naught, we are still going to be eventually taken over by robots with AI. So there...

I remain an unrepentant neo-Luddite.