And Now Lawyers Try To Save The World

~ Cheryl

I joked last year about the possibility of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider creating baby black holes that would grow and Eat Us All!!! And of course other people thought about that too. Now Rick Kleffel tells me that some guys from Hawai’i are suing CERN because they are convinced we are all doomed unless the LHC is stopped. It has been in a science fiction book, but must be real, right? Anyway, Rick’s podcast is here. It has Rudy Rucker describing the beginning of the end of the world in it too.

The annoying thing is that I have a vague memory an SF book in which Earth was destroyed by an escaped black hole. I’m sure i reviewed it. But I can’t remember which book it was. Can anyone help?

Update: See here for a whole pile of background on the lawsuit story (thanks George!) and here for Bad Astronomy’s (equally dismissive) take on the issue (thanks Zemanta).

9 thoughts on “And Now Lawyers Try To Save The World”

  1. Are you sure you aren’t recalling “The Hole Man” by Larry Niven, in which a quantum singularity was accidentally released from alien technology and dropped into the heart of Mars?

  2. There are a number of “nanoscale black hole is created, drops to the center of the planet, eats it away over a period of decades” stories. Can’t remember any specific titles, though.

  4. How about David Brin’s Earth? I think the Earth was saved though. It’s been a few years since I read it.

    George

  6. None of these ring a Bell. Hyperion is the only one I’ve read, and that was years ago. But, as Andy says, it is hardly a unique idea.

  8. I suspect the book you’re thinking of is “Thrice upon a Time” by James P. Hogan. At least it includes a super smasher that spawns tiny black holes that accumulate, eventually to threaten the earth’s destruction.

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