Let's roll back a few days.
This is CERN, the Nuclear Research laboratory
on the border of France and Switzerland.
It features the most powerful
particle accelerator on Earth.
It accelerates and collides particles
99.99% the speed of light.
And maybe, it could produce
the very first lab-grown
Ah, black holes.
Gravitational matter-devouring monsters
traveling across the
Universe on their own terms.
Some of them are so big,
they could gobble up the Sun in a day.
Could scientists create one of those at CERN?
Theoretically, yes.
But could a lab-made black hole
be the end of Earth?
Let's see.
The LHC is a 27 km (16.7 mi) ring
of superconducting magnets.
Inside, it accelerates particles
to move at almost the speed of light.
These particles are bound to collide.
And when they do,
they produce enough energy
to create new particles.
We're talking about very
small amounts of energy here.
The numbers are so tiny
that scientists came up
with a new unit of energy
to measure particle energies at that scale.
It's called the tera electron volt (TeV).
Fourteen TeV give you new particles.
One followed by 19 zeros of TeV
would give you a black hole.
Already picturing doomsday scenarios?
That's very much in the spirit of What If.
But that's not how it would go down.
If one of the experiments at the LHC
ended with scientists creating a black hole,
that black hole would be microscopic,
as in quantum-level small.
It would have a mass about
40 million times smaller
than the E. coli bacterium.
It wouldn't get out of the accelerator
and rampage across the planet,
chewing up everything in its way.
Well, it could get out,
but because of its laughably
small gravitational pull,
it wouldn't attract a single piece of matter.
The black hole would lose its energy,
through what's known as Hawking radiation,
long before it could gain
any substantial mass.
As if it never existed in the first place.
Even when folks at CERN
build a next-generation lab,
the Future Circular Collider,
that will outpower the Large Hadron Collider,
we'll still be pretty safe.
For a lab-produced black hole
to potentially cause any damage,
it would need to have a mass of
at least 0.00002 g (0.0000007 oz).
That's about 50 times smaller
than the mass of an ant.
It would take that black hole
nine octillion years to reach
the size of 1 kg (2.2 lbs).
And another decillion years
to swallow up the Earth.
The whole process would take longer
than the age of the Universe.
I'd say no need to worry about it at all.
The Earth doesn't get destroyed
every time physicists do something cool.
Unfortunately.
But if something does go wrong,
and you find yourself
one-on-one with a black hole,
don't panic.
Tune in to our new show, How to Survive.
There, we've got you covered
for any life-threatening scenario,
to help you survive whatever awaits you.
