Originally Posted by **********

Hello -

If the LHC creates a black hole, it will be a very tiny one that will wink out of existance immediately. And if it is able to do so, mini black holes would be created in nature all the time so they say.

A bigger worry is a "Stranglet Disaster". A strangelet or "strange nugget" is a hypothetical object consisting of a bound state of roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks. The size could be anything from a few femtometers across (with the mass of a light nucleus) to something much larger. Once the size becomes macroscopic (on the order of meters across), such an object is usually called a quark star or "strange star" rather than a strangelet. An equivalent description is that a strangelet is a small fragment of strange matter. The term "strangelet" originates with E. Farhi and R. Jaffe.[1] Strangelets have been suggested as a dark matter candidate.

If the strange matter hypothesis is correct and a strangelet comes in contact with a lump of ordinary matter such as Earth, it could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter. This "ice-nine" disaster scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter.

Yay!!