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Humans could 'safely' enter a black hole, physicists say
- Thread starter Forerunner
- Start date
The "event horizon" is named as such because beyond it nothing can escape the gravitational pull, not even light. Hence why the black hole is black
it's just a nice way of saying "ripped apart at an atomical level", so yes, very death.
good thing is you wouldn't even have the time to realize it, so pretty painless. except for the anticipation as you approach the event horizon, I guess.
Yeah that's more or less how I feel, like I doubt the human body could survive the gravity of a blackhole torn apart or not so the whole premise is like we could survive, if, we had a ship with some kind of anti gravity strong enough to counter it because at least then it and you wouldn't be dismantled on the way down but we probably won't so nope, still dying.
Like, how long would you survive on Jupiter's surface, you're not getting torn apart but a human won't last long regardless.
Yeah at the very least you should be able to have a guy Morse code his findings to you. But my next question would be how the time dilation impacts these strategies. It seems like you would be stuck with the worst lag of all time if you're only receiving bits per year. So you might get a message or video or something back, but it might take centuries to even begin a transmission from inside.
I'm guessing because you're in space. There's just no force in the other direction to make a rip.
But that's just me speculating.
You would. Basically all objects travel in straight lines with gravity bending spacetime in a way to make those straight lines look like curves. Earth is traveling in straight line but the suns gravity bends space in such a way that this line becomes Earths orbital path.
An event horizon is basically a point where all possible travel lines through space all lead to the singularity, there's no way of getting out; i.e. you're fucked.
Imagine a whirlpool of fantastical myth and legend, existing in an otherwise calm sea. A big freaking hole in the ocean that water is somehow flowing into. If you're in a boat that can do 30mph, you could maybe get sort of close without falling in, but get too close and you can't power your way out. When you're that close, things are really tumultuous. If you instead stay a mile away, things look calm, and the current is only flowing very slowly toward the whirlpool, so you're not in any danger.
Now imagine this same situation, but the huge whirlpool is now a billion times larger. You're a long long long ways from the whirlpool, and you look around and think you're on completely calm sea. But you check your GPS and learn, to your horror, that the "calm" ocean that your boat is sitting on is actually moving at 31mph toward the whirlpool. You're in the "slow" current a long ways from the tumultuousness, but you're still trapped: if you attempt to power your way out, you're still moving toward the whirlpool at 1mph.
That's how it is with the event horizons of black holes. With the really huge ones, you can be close enough that you're falling toward the singularity faster than light, even if the space around you isn't crazy distorted.
No.
Quantum entanglement can guarantee that the behavior of one particle correlates to the behavior of another. But you can't just use it to send messages. Forcing a particle to take on a certain state is fundamentally something that will break the entanglement.
But what if the black hole grants you immortality, and you're stuck as a 120 year old?
This doesn't make sense to me. I would think the gravitational pull at any black hole's event horizon would be exactly the same regardless of how far from the center, because that's the threshold where it becomes too powerful for any light to escape. It's not like that threshold is variable.
Threshold isn't variable but they believe there is a gradient to the severity of the pull based on distance to the center, like how you experience Earth's gravity differently on the moon, at sea level or on a mountain.
Even if we could, I doubt it would give us any useful information. The event horizon is simply the outermost point at which everything falls into the black hole faster than light. Beyond that limit, everything would still be falling toward the center faster than light, so you wouldn't be able to see anything except maybe the stuff falling in after you. You still wouldn't be able to see the singularity.
The stretching/ripping doesn't come from event horizon, it comes from the gradient of the gravitational field being so extreme that one end of your body experiences orders of magnitude more force than the other end only a few feet further out. Gravity is proportional to 1/distance^2, so the strength of the force rapidly increases closer to the center (and rapidly decreases further out).
But yea, everything about this is still dumb because basic body functions like our circulatory system are not possible under extreme gravity much less the point where not even light can escape at the event horizon.
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Not if it's a dormant black hole (not currently feeding on any matter at the time)
I guess I'm not sure how it works, but I figured a larger black hole would just have a larger gravitational pull at the center? So it's not like the gradient is building up to the same end force just more spread out, but instead ramps up to a higher number at the end, so gradual increase in gravity could be similar despite increased distance. Though if the gradient is nonlinear then it probably throws all of that out of whack anyway.
I read you would get strung out into molecular spaghetti while time dilates so it feels like an eternity. Thanks but no thanks.
The pics in the article are kinda shit but the first does illustrate the non linearity of the force. The extreme cliff from the flat plane to the hole is the part that's doing the stretching.
The good news is that there would be no time dilation on your end since everything is relative and you'd be dead or at least unconscious long before the weirder stretching stuff could happen.
Consider the Earth versus a kettle on a burning stove. The water at the bottom of the kettle is very hot but the water at the top is not that hot. If you touched the bottom with a finger you'd only burn a part of it. Earth is too large for you to feel a temperature differential between the heat at the core and the heat on the surface but we all know it's there.
Hypothetically a black hole's gravity gradient will scale to the size of its event horizon (or rather the radius of the event horizon will indicate how "large" the hole is). It is not one uniform pull everywhere inside the hole, based on current models.
The really funny part about their suggestion is that it depends on the supermassive hole not having an accretion disc which would vaporize you instantly, but if there's no disc how will you tell it's there? Classic physicists assuming ideal conditions.
I'm unsure if thoughts are even possible inside the event horizon even assuming you could find one and fall into it. My instinct is that the electrons that make up your nervous system would be unable to move along their pathways in the gravity well, so you'd perceive nothing and feel nothing. Your nervous system is actually much slower than the speed of light.
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It doesn't matter that your nervous system is sluggish. You'd be able to think for the same reason that you don't get spaghettified: the acceleration due to gravity is roughly the same everywhere on your body. When all the sluggish stuff is accelerated in the same direction at the same rate, you'll feel basically the same as if you're in perpetual freefall in a space station above the Earth.
Ah, I did not consider that. Sluggish nervous system + time dilation would probably cancel out, would be trippy.
Surely the physicists calculated the quantum entanglement measurables of love into their equations.
This isn't new information. There's almost no difference between just outside and just inside the horizon, except that you couldn't escape. And you still couldn't go near the centre.
