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Old 08-October-2008, 05:09 PM
Warren Platts Warren Platts is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Demigrog View Post
We should be long dead then; this sort of speculation ignores the fact that cosmic ray collisions with the atmosphere are far more energetic, and they have yet to destroy Earth.
We've been through this so many times before in this thread; it's easier for me to just quote G&M again: "In view of the value for Earth [stopping distance of mBH's] 3 × 1011 cm, these [stopping] mechanisms [in Earth] cannot efficiently slow down neutral C[osmic]R[ay]-produced black holes in Earth, or in other bodies such as planets and ordinary stars." (p. 33)

Quote:
Originally Posted by NEOWatcher
Ok; I may not be keen enough to follow all your math and arguments, but I do feel I know enough to ask...
How valid is the 6D scenerio anyway? Is there as much data to back it up as there is for 10D or 11D?
I agree that my choice of parameters is "fine-tuned", but they are taken from the allowable parameter space. You might be right that it's more likely that we live in 10 dimensions rather than 6 dimensions, based on a priori considerations. However, such a priori considerations cannot rule out a 6-D (or 5-D) world, and there certainly is no experimental data that can rule out 6-D scenarios. The mere fact that 6-D scenarios might be unlikely compared to 10 or 11-D scenarios doesn't really affect my argument: or rather it would if all we were talking about was a $100 bet on the outcome of an experiment. In the present case, we're betting the planet. "Unlikely" isn't good enough. We need reasonable certainty (a term I thought I had coined, but I see that Plaga uses it as well) that Earth-swallowing scenarios cannot occur.

Last edited by Warren Platts; 09-October-2008 at 01:20 AM.. Reason: style
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