Could scientists accidentally destroy the Earth with a lab-grown black hole?

What happens when science goes wrong, and humankind’s technological hubris causes global calamity? Usually, the credits roll, these types of scenarios are almost always science fiction. But, since it’s black hole week at NASA, we thought we’d have a little fun imagining the complete and accidental annihilation of our planet.

Back in the 1930s, there was a brief moment when some of the physicists working with Einstein on the atom bomb stopped to wonder if exploding such a device would end up lighting the Earth’s atmosphere on fire and destroying the entire planet.

The team did some quick math and decided it wasn’t likely, and that was the end of that.

But that didn’t stop some folks in the media from running with the story after one of the men…