I think your answers above might be incorporated into your post statement also.

thank you for your important questions. Only probabilistic answers can be given. I try to specify.

• “At what energy level would the LHC be capable of forming these black holes that could consume the earth?”
The probability that any earth-bound energy level suffices would be zero if black holes could be charged in accordance with the currently accepted (but disproved) paradigm. In that case, the unknown plausibility of string theory would put a – possibly quite low – upper bound on the hoped for success. Moreover, any formed black holes would not need to be feared since their electrical stickiness inside matter would prove their automatically likewise existing much faster natural cousins innocuous. Thus on the basis of previously accepted knowledge, CERN is safe regarding black holes. Even though 95 percent of theoretical physicist work on string theory as an insider told me, CERN and most applied physicists scoff at the idea but try to be polite and would, of course, be delighted if the experiment were to be successful in this sense. Having the string theorists in the boat greatly enhances their clout with the physics community.

Unfortunately, the new unchargedness of black holes (unless disproved after 4 years) possesses an inverse corollary: Charged particles (like the electron) can no longer be point-shaped because they would then be smaller than their own Schwarzschild radius and hence as black holes be uncharged. Therefore, “something” (call it “string theory of the future”) empirically prevents electrons from being maximally small in nature.

No one has currently any idea at what particle mass-energy the new empirically valid “boring-open force” in nature that prevents electrons from being point-shaped, sets in. This threshold for the onset of string-analogous behavior in nature can lie anywhere in between the Planck energy of 20 orders beyond the proton mass (at 1020 proton masses) which is forever unreachable by accelerators, and the thousand proton masses (103) already reached by pre-LHC accelerators. Since no one has any idea as to the actual value, all orders of magnitude within this 17-orders-of-magnitude range (between 20 and 3) have the same probability as far as doing experiments is concerned. CERN covers about one new order of magnitude – or more than half of one – at last year’s energy, which fact lets it achieve a probability of about one in 25, or four percent. This year, a quintupled effort in terms of the cumulative number of collisions to be reached is planned, setting-in in late March or early April.

This number – four percent – represents my answer to your first question. But tomorrow already, new evidence may come in from somewhere that either exculpates this energy range or drastically increases its statistical weight. At the time being though, the danger implicit in the current energy level of CERN cannot be considered to lie below the finite-percentage range, to the best of my knowledge.

• “Once that energy level has been reached, how many years would have to go by before you could conclude that the LHC is indeed not forming earth threatening black holes?”

First, no one knows how long it will take in case the LHC produces undetectable black holes until a “sufficiently slow one” to stay inside earth (slower than 17 kilometers per second) is formed. This time lag is the smaller the larger the luminosity (accumulated collision number) becomes. One can only hope that last year’s luminosity remained safely below that critical value, although even then a scant event could have been included in the distribution.

How much time remains then? Here I found (and sent to CERN 4 years ago and published soon after) a new physical result, the “quasar scaling law” as it can be called: Quasars in the sky, powered by a black hole of up to 20 billion solar masses, form an exceptional class of physical objects (“attractors in real space”). While beetles – a biological analogue – come in self-similar varieties scaling by about 3 orders of magnitude (between a stag beetle and a bed-bug), quasars are empirically known to scale by 10 orders of magnitude. Quasars grow exponentially inside matter (as long as there is food). This is known but unappreciated.

The new thing is that the hierarchy does not stop at about one solar mass, as it does empirically so far. Chaos theory allows one to understand quasars as “attractors in real space.” As such, their scaling law continues downwards. The point is that even the first mini-black hole getting stuck inside earth is most likely to implement the quasar self-similarity, starting to grow exponentially inside earth. The hierarchy is thereby added another 57 (or so) orders of magnitude. In other words, there is no more dangerous bug in the universe than the black hole attractor. To pull it inside earth is not recommendable. Nothing is more unstoppable in the universe (as long as there is something to eat).

Everybody knows about compound interest. Or the game of doubling wheat grains on a checkerboard. The little engine that could inside earth would not take long – 50 months? – to do its job. Thus after 5 years or a small finite multiple, the black-hole danger could be said to be over.

This was two maximally hard questions. Thank you. Perhaps the world will now see that it is worthwhile after all, to seek a way to prove at least one result, in the chain of bad news posed to us by nature as if as a trap, wrong. Nothing else was ever requested.

Dear Mr. Johnson, I appreciate your perspicuousness and kindness.

Sincerely yours,
Otto E. Rossler

http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/PetitiontoCERN.pdf; http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/apetitiontocern/

Your “mentor Konrad Lorenz” was a supporter of Nazi-fascism and a bloody racist. He wrote in 1940: “The racial idea as the basis of our political system has already infinitely done much in this direction.” With “this direction” he meant the eradication of what he thought are “asocial cells” and “ethical inferior”. Even in writings of the 70s he repeated this ideology. You are proud of him? You try to use his “authority”? Disgusting!

For more quotations and references see (in German language, but quite detailed): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Lorenz

Pinky, the gothic mouse