November, 2007: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is turned on. Despite the astronomical odds against it, the LHC begins producing micro black holes at the rate of one per second. Equally unlikely, Hawking radiation turns out to be incorrect, and the micro black holes are stable. They are pulled towards the center of the earth, where they coalesce in to a larger black hole. The technicians at CERN turn the LHC off, but it's too late. The news goes out all over the world: we all have fifteen minutes to live before the black hole reaches critical mass and the earth implodes at the speed of light.
Fifteen minutes pass, and nothing happens. Twenty minutes. An hour. Finally, two hours pass, and our death sentence is revoked. For some reason that physicists don't yet understand, the black hole has evaporated.
For two hours, everyone on earth believed that they were about to die.
What effect do you think this would have on our society? On religion? On you personally?
2007-04-19
15:03:54
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15 answers
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asked by
RabidBunyip
4