Large Hadron Collider is now active

I still prefer a black hole over...  [size=12pt]ZOMBIES[/size]!

WE'RE ALL GOING TO TURN INTO STRANGELETS!!!!!!!!!!

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Mike or Cameron,

isn't it also true that black holes can lay dorment, and pass us by without causing a blip?

I can't comment on that completely as I've never heard of that.  But my first reaction is that it is totally wrong.  Black holes are caused by uberdense mass causing an extremely steep gravitational gradient.  It's like saying that sometimes Black holes don't have any mass in them, and then suddenly they are full of mass.  While there are a lot of things I don't know everything about, this one just seems wrong...  unless it's being worded weird.

In the last two days I was pulled into a couple of social studies classes to explain that we weren't all going to die.

I may be completely wrong about this, but - isn't the amount of gravity exerted by a black hole still a function of it's mass, like any other thing made of matter?  If so, a tiny black hole, while very densely packed, would still have only the same amount of mass as the particle from which it was created right?  Therefor, it's net gravitational force would still only be the same as the original particle from which the tiny black hole was made?  I was a history major, so I may be clueless, but is there any big gap I am missing?  What I picture is that if you took two particles, which already exert x amount of force and "collided" them to make a very dense object out of those two particles, it should only be able to produce the same amount of gravitational force as the original two particles.  I thought the problems occurred in that space very close to a black hole, probably within the area that would have been occupied by solid matter were it not so tightly condensed, where the gravity exerted by the hole is extremely concentrated.  Am I right?  Does it really matter?  Is anyone still reading this?  Do I even care at this point?

Ah, a dormant black hole just has no mass to suck in. My fault.

Dormant implies that there is something that can go "active" in a black hole.  This is not the case.  A black hole that has not yet gone "active" is called a star.  Once it becomes a black hole, that's it, nothing really changes.

Now, what I think you're referring to Tom, is the idea that our planet is bombarded constantly by what are called "black hole fragments".  This has been used to explain ball lightning and other such phenomenon.  However, nothing has really been suggested that this is the case, and it is much more likely that something far less outlandish is the cause.  Black hole fragments without the mass to maintain the density required would fall apart quite quickly, and not last long enough to make it to our star system, much less our planet.