Sol Invictus,
Weren't there some very massive black-holes that were created from the universe forming? And how much mass would the "micro singularities" created in the LHC be? And how much would be necessary to swallow up the whole earth... and how certain are we that mass is accurate?
I thought cosmic rays were energy, very low-wavelength, even lower than gamma-rays, not protons...
INRM
To start with, there is no such thing as lower wavelengths than gamma rays, gamma rays are the shortest wavelengths possible. Cosmic rays can be anything. Any particle coming to Earth from somewhere outside the Earth is a cosmic ray. Depending on your definition, particles from within the Solar System may not be counted, so the Solar wind won't count. Otherwise, everything is fair game. Photons from stars, hydrogen in the interstellar medium, electrons and protons from energetic reactions, even heavy elements from supernovae. They are all cosmic rays if they hit us.
At the moment, the energy of particles reaching us from things like supernovae are far, far higher than the energies we can create ourselves. If anything at all dangerous were going to happen, it would have happened long ago. Also, it would have happened all over the place, not just here.
Black holes were not created at the start of the universe. Early on, everything was simply far too hot for even atoms to form, let alone anything larger. Once things had cooled down a bit, matter could settle down into clumps, eventually forming stars, galaxies and so on. At the moment, we're not really sure exactly what came first. It could have been massive black holes which attracted other matter to form galaxies, or galaxies could have formed and then produced black holes at their centre (personally, I prefer the latter theory). What is certain is that massive black holes were not present in the early universe. Very small ones could have been present, but since they evaporate very quickly it is difficult to tell.
Finally, I'm not really sure how big a black hole would have to be to eat the Earth, and I don't know if anything more than a back of the envelope calculation has ever been done, since it isn't really something that anyone worries about. Basically, black holes emit energy (although whether that energy contains information is a different question). The smaller they are, the faster they emit it, so large, star sized hole last for billions of years, but the tiny kind that could be produced by particle collisions last fractions of a nanosecond. In order to be a danger to Earth, a black hole would have to consume matter faster than it evaporated. Once this process started, it would accelerate since a larger hole would evaporate slower but consume mass faster. While I really don't know how big it would need to be for this to happen, I do know that it is much bigger than anything we can currently manage.
One thing worth bearing in mind is that the LHC will initially collide particles with a centre of mass energy of about 1TeV (1,000,000,000,000 electron-volts), although it will eventually reach 14TeV. The Tevatron has been running since 1983. It collides particles with CoM energy of 1.96TeV. As far as I can tell, the Earth is still here.
