On the LHC black holes vs cosmic ray black holes, both kinds of black holes emerge with nonzero charge and will very rapidly brake to a halt. And there’s cosmic rays hitting neutron stars, as well, and cosmic rays colliding in the magnetic field of neutron stars, LHC style. Bottom line is, the HLC has to be extremely exceptional to destroy the earth. It just doesn’t look this exceptional.
The thing is that a very tiny black hole has incredibly low accretion rate (quite reliable argument here; it takes a long time to push Earth through a needle’s eye, even at very high pressure) and even if we had many of those inside stars, planets, etc. we would never know. The HLC may have ‘doomed’ the Earth—to be destroyed in many billions years timespan.
The more interesting example would be PRA—probabilistic risk analysis—such as done for space shuttle, nuclear reactors, et cetera. The risk is calculated based on a sum of risks over very small selection of events (picked out of the space of possible events), and the minuscule risk figures that get calculated is representative not of low probability of failure but of low probability that the failure will be among the N guesses.
At same time, we have no good reason to believe PRA works at all, and a plenty of examples (Space Shuttle, nuclear reactors) where PRA was found off by a factor of 1000 (high confidence result ’cause its highly unlikely space shuttle PRA was correct yet two were lost).
The way I’d describe PRA is as estimating failure rate of a ball bearing in a car by adding up failure rates of the individual balls and other components. That’s obviously absurd; the balls and their environment interact in such complicated, non-linear ways that you can’t predict their failure rates by adding up component failure rates.
If a method clearly won’t work for something as simple as a ball bearing, why would anyone assume it’d work for space shuttle or nuclear power plant which are much much more complex than ball bearing? My theory is that those things are so complicated that a person has such difficulty of reasoning about them as to be unable to even see that they are too complex for PRA to work; while ball bearing is simple enough. At same time there’s a demand for some number to be given; this demand creates pseudoscience.
On the LHC black holes vs cosmic ray black holes, both kinds of black holes emerge with nonzero charge and will very rapidly brake to a halt. And there’s cosmic rays hitting neutron stars, as well, and cosmic rays colliding in the magnetic field of neutron stars, LHC style. Bottom line is, the HLC has to be extremely exceptional to destroy the earth. It just doesn’t look this exceptional.
The thing is that a very tiny black hole has incredibly low accretion rate (quite reliable argument here; it takes a long time to push Earth through a needle’s eye, even at very high pressure) and even if we had many of those inside stars, planets, etc. we would never know. The HLC may have ‘doomed’ the Earth—to be destroyed in many billions years timespan.
The more interesting example would be PRA—probabilistic risk analysis—such as done for space shuttle, nuclear reactors, et cetera. The risk is calculated based on a sum of risks over very small selection of events (picked out of the space of possible events), and the minuscule risk figures that get calculated is representative not of low probability of failure but of low probability that the failure will be among the N guesses.
At same time, we have no good reason to believe PRA works at all, and a plenty of examples (Space Shuttle, nuclear reactors) where PRA was found off by a factor of 1000 (high confidence result ’cause its highly unlikely space shuttle PRA was correct yet two were lost).
The way I’d describe PRA is as estimating failure rate of a ball bearing in a car by adding up failure rates of the individual balls and other components. That’s obviously absurd; the balls and their environment interact in such complicated, non-linear ways that you can’t predict their failure rates by adding up component failure rates.
If a method clearly won’t work for something as simple as a ball bearing, why would anyone assume it’d work for space shuttle or nuclear power plant which are much much more complex than ball bearing? My theory is that those things are so complicated that a person has such difficulty of reasoning about them as to be unable to even see that they are too complex for PRA to work; while ball bearing is simple enough. At same time there’s a demand for some number to be given; this demand creates pseudoscience.