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This is a spin-off thread from the thread "A Black Hole in the LHC":
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=1860755#post1860755
The scientific debate (in as much as it is scientific ) about the remote possibility that micro black holes even exist, and could even be produced at the relatively low energies of the LHC (only 7 times higher than existing accelerators), and that they would not evaporate quickly as should be the case with Hawking radiation, and would be in such kinematic conditions that they'd be captured in the Earth gravitational field, and that they would nevertheless interact strongly enough with matter to slowly eat up the Earth from within on a time scale shorter than the remaining lifetime of Earth in the solar system etc... takes place in that thread. However, in that thread, the issue was raised:
"What's an Acceptable Risk for Destroying the Earth?"
My provocative answer was the following:
This is of course more an ethical and philosophical debate than a scientific one. So here we go
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=1860755#post1860755
The scientific debate (in as much as it is scientific ) about the remote possibility that micro black holes even exist, and could even be produced at the relatively low energies of the LHC (only 7 times higher than existing accelerators), and that they would not evaporate quickly as should be the case with Hawking radiation, and would be in such kinematic conditions that they'd be captured in the Earth gravitational field, and that they would nevertheless interact strongly enough with matter to slowly eat up the Earth from within on a time scale shorter than the remaining lifetime of Earth in the solar system etc... takes place in that thread. However, in that thread, the issue was raised:
"What's an Acceptable Risk for Destroying the Earth?"
My provocative answer was the following:
It's funny, but there's an entirely adequate answer to that, as far as we consider that the only valuable thing on Earth are the human lives that are right now living on it, and that we don't delve into ethical and philosophical debates about "Gaia" or "future generations" and so on. After all, if Earth is destroyed, those future generations will never exist, and hence will never have to be considered.
So we have to find out what is the acceptable risk of killing 6 billion people. Given that car accidents alone already kill 1.2 million people per year, and that this is considered an acceptable risk, visibly if the risk of killing 6 billion people is acceptable on the same level, it should be of the same magnitude, which means that the probability of it occurring should be about 5000 times smaller (because 5000 times more lives) than the probability of killing 1.2 million people, which is once every year. So the acceptable risk of destroying Earth must be about 1/5000 per year.
Of course, something is not right in this reasoning, and that is that the acceptability of a certain risk is a function of the advantage we get from taking that risk. We accept 1.2 million dead per year because it allows us to travel around. It is not clear that the LHC gives us the same kind of global benefit. But I guess a probability of 1/5000 per year probability of destroying the Earth is in the acceptable ballpark, give or take a few orders of magnitude.
This is of course more an ethical and philosophical debate than a scientific one. So here we go
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