In the popular imagination, black holes are voracious monstrosities gulping down anything in their vicinity. That is why there are occasional worries that physicists might accidentally or intentionally create one, perhaps inside a particle accelerator such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva. Would such a dark behemoth swallow up Earth itself? Not quite. No one has ever created a black hole on our planet before. But even if someone did, it likely wouldn’t pose a huge threat.
Real-world black holes are only scary in the sense that if you get too close to one, you won’t be able to escape. But even if someone generated a black hole in a laboratory on Earth, the limits of human technology would prevent us from whipping up anything particularly dangerous. “It would likely be so low-mass that its gravitational influence would be relatively small,” says Eliot Quataert, a theoretical astrophysicist at Princeton University. “It wouldn’t actually gobble up that much matter.”
In fact, the possibility of creating a black hole in a lab is a goal that scientists are actively pursuing—one that could allow researchers to answer many fundamental questions about quantum mechanics and the nature of gravity.
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