Quote:
Originally Posted by Sethomas
[...] this puts the physics community in the awkward position of telling the world, "According to these equations, the odds of a black hole created in an accelerator destroying the Earth are on the scale of one in a billion trillion. Right now we're fairly sure that these equations are accurate."
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In my junior year of college, I attended a lecture given by Velojia Tokarevsky (sp?), who later went on to become the head of Nuclear Power Oversight in the (then) Soviet Union. This lecture, incidentally, occurred about 6 months after the accident at Three Mile Island. In it, he presented some factual data and some questionable assumptions (estimating the chance of a catastrophic nuclear accident to be equivalent to the earth being struck by a meteorite causing similar catastrophic damage), culminating in his final pronouncement that nuclear power was safe.
Of course, on his watch in the USSR, a little thing called Chernobyl happened.
The problem in making ridiculous estimates like "one in a billion trillion" is that no one thinks about what happens if that "one" actually hits - Poof. The gun goes off, and the cat is dead. Or in this case, the earth.