It's simpler than that with black holes in this case, at least as far as determining risk.
A black hole is not a literal hole that simply sucks in matter. Black holes are the result of extremely densely packed matter, and have a gravitational field that warps space to the point where light is trapped if it passes within the object's event horizon.
However, a black hole doesn't magically gain a stronger gravitational pull simply because it's a black hole. If you packed 2 protons worth of mass densely enough to form a black hole, the gravitational pull of the resulting object would still be equivalent to the 2 proton masses you began with.
At the scales we're talking about for the LHC, any resultant black holes would have extremely weak gravitational fields (odd to say that about a black hole, but we're talking about black holes with less mass than most atoms). The event horizon in such a case would be tiny, even on an atomic scale - and the gravitational pull generated would be just as insignificant as anything else of the same mass. It would be insufficient to break any sort of bond at all. The strong and weak atomic forces, electromagnetism,
everything is stronger than gravity at those scales. The black hole wouldn't be able to "consume" anything at all, because it wouldn't have enough force to pull anything to it.
Black holes as we typically understand them have masses equivalent to thousands or millions of Suns. The reason they're so powerful is because they're so
massive, in some cases single objects less than a solar system in diameter that comprise a significant fraction of the mass of an entire
galaxy.
Microscopic black holes have nearly no mass. They couldn't "consume" a water molecule, let alone the Earth - one of these black holes wouldn't even be able to break the bonds that hold the Oxygen and Hydrogen atoms bound together.
The problem here is that people hear "black hole" and immediately think of the typical star-swallowing monsters we detect in space. The sorts of black holes we may generate with the LHC are virtually nothing like their larger cousins.
If you took the mass of the Earth (roughly 6e24 kg) and condensed it into a black hole, the event horizon would have a radius of only
8.9 mm.
Can you imagine the radius of a black hole containing the mass of only a few protons?
That's not "microscopic." That's beyond even
femptoscopic.
This on top of the fact that black holes evaporate over time through
Hawking radiation. A black hole with a mass of 2.28e5 kg would only last for 1
secondbefore evaporating completely. How long do you think a black hole with just a few atoms worth of mass will take to evaporate? Far faster than it can acquire new mass, given that its gravitational force is insufficient to really do any of that anyway.
I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
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