“His fears were probably overblown, since scientists think that such “mini-black holes” would basically evaporate almost instantly, so they shouldn’t be a threat to us. However, there was at least some truthful basis to what he was ranting about.”
A black hole starts with a sun much more massive than our’s. Yes, having one of those around, even a light year away, might be a real problem. But our sun, which is much too small to turn into a black hole, is 1.3 million times more massive than the Earth.
I read about the experiments to produce a micro black hole. Yeah, lots of luck with that.
These fears are similar to global warming. The sun is so much more contributory to the Earth’s temperature that all other factors are too small to cause warming. I recall the CO2 idea from college, but even then I knew there were times when the Earth had much more CO2 than today and was in an ice age.
People really have little grasp of the realities of physics and thermodynamics. One of the professors at my college had a fairly high profile and was regularly in the news. People would bring him wonderful ideas about how to solve the world’s energy problems and he would give them to his classes. We would destroy them in about five minutes flat with math and unbreakable physical laws.
I would suspect that interacting with even a MINI-black hole might suck; big time!