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Amazing. If I’m ever terminally ill I want to be shot into a supermassive black hole. I just want to know what it’s like — I’m dying anyway.
by gigatexal 6y ago
Amazing. If I’m ever terminally ill I want to be shot into a supermassive black hole. I just want to know what it’s like — I’m dying anyway.
- warent 6y agoI imagine it's similar to having your upper-torso tied to a pole and your lower-torso tied to a car, meanwhile the universe rapidly ages into an ever-shrinking sphere behind you. It sounds nightmarishly painful--physically and existentially
- mhh__ 6y agoGreat way to go though. An experience you literally cannot describe
- goldenkey 6y agoI'd presume death to be like that anyhow given the flurry of brain activity directly during and in the nights/dreams leading up to death.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoAnd I’m afraid the time would be weird so that may happen for a very long time.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoIt should remain the same in your "local" experience.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoAh well that does make me feel better somewhat.
- contravariant 6y agoIf it's a big enough black hole then you'd only see the ageing universe shrink behind you. The spaghettification comes later.
- wcoenen 6y agoI imagine the tidal forces would not just feel like you're being stretched, but it would also feel like you're hanging upside-down. And this would be independent of whether your head is pointing towards the black hole or away from it; basically your feet and head are trying to "fall" away from each other.
- saagarjha 6y agoFor a supermassive black hole the gravity gradient shouldn’t be all the bad until you’re way past the event horizon. Perhaps it might even be pleasant?
- bicolao 6y agoKurzgesagt channel gives two choices beyond event horizon. Speculation of course. https://youtu.be/e-P5IFTqB98?t=150 https://youtu.be/e-P5IFTqB98?t=150
- n0on3 6y agoI'm no expert but from what I recall you wouldn't get there: as you get closer you would reach a point where the difference of gravity in the space occupied by your own body is such that you would get torn apart and turned into spaghetti
- v7p1Qbt1im 6y agoWhat if it does something weird like trapping your consciousness in a loop for eternity. That would presumably be far worse than simply dying. (Sorry)
- airstrike 6y agoRelated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jaunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jaunt
- v7p1Qbt1im 6y agoThis is terrifying. And it might be where they got inspiration for the Black Mirror episode ‚White Christmas‘.
- julius_set 6y ago“I have no mouth and I must scream” basically but black hole edition. Wonder if it’s possible for some type of unique intelligence to live inside a black hole. There are lots of particles rushing towards the singularity and if there are “holes” small enough in the black where these particles spaghettify maybe some some electrical activity might organize together into some kind of intelligence (for brief moments). I.e. conscious “beings” spontaneously appearing and disintegrating in and out of existence at these extreme gravitational levels.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoWouldn't that - theoretically speaking - be really difficult and cost a lot of energy (delta-v), just like how it costs a lot to get closer to our sun?
- saagarjha 6y agoDepends on the black hole! For Sagittarius A* you’d need about 250 km/s in delta-v. If you’re targeting a supermassive black hole in another galaxy you’ll need at least 500 km/s to leave ours.
- chronolitus 6y agoFor comparison getting to LEO (low earth orbit) is ~10km/s, getting from LEO to moon is ~6km/s, from LEO to the sun is ~30km/s.
- himinlomax 6y agoConsidering how long it would take to get to the nearest black hole, you're already too dying to get there in time. You should have asked your great great (...) great grand parents to settle closer to one.
- onion2k 6y agoI think there are a lot of people who would readily trade 50 years of life to be the first person to be fired in to a blackhole. You're dying regardless. An illness only affects how long it takes. When Mars One launched their competition to become the first people to go to Mars, explicitly on a one-way trip, more than 200,000 people expressed an interest. Only 4000 or so actually paid the competition entrance fee though. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One#Astronaut_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One#Astronaut_selection)
- adrianN 6y agoIf Mars One weren't such an obvious scam I'm sure a lot more people would have expressed interest.
- coldtea 6y ago>You're dying regardless. An illness only affects how long it takes. Well, "how long it takes" is kind of the whole point though... Few are rushing to die...
- onion2k 6y agoSome people are willing to trade the risk of death (or even the certainty) for the chance of being first to achieve something notable. Plenty of people would rather live a short but exceptional life instead of an uninteresting long one.
- coldtea 6y agoYes. People not satisfied with their life.
- bottled_poe 6y agoNot sure how painful this would be. Slowly being stretched into pieces doesn’t sound like the most pleasant way to go.
- murukesh_s 6y ago
- bamboozled 6y agoWould it not just be like getting crushed by a very heavy object?
- DrBazza 6y agoBlack holes are weird. So weird in fact, that the tidal forces are uneven across your body to the point where you'd black out because the blood had drained into your feet first. You have to go through "regular G force" before you get to the fun part [1] Then there's spaghettification [2], the fun part, which will squeeze you and stretch you into a paste. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force#Horizontal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force#Horizontal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification
- bamboozled 6y agoThanks !
- kleiba 6y agoI just want to know what it’s like It sucks.
- saagarjha 6y agoSpeaking from experience, are you?
- jvzr 6y agoIt's a pun
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoBlack Holes suck, and then you die.
- threatripper 6y agoWhat do you mean with being terminally ill? Statistically speaking your body will give up at 80 years of age. This is without any special condition like cancer at a young age. You can calculate how long you would have left. When planning your life you better take into account that you only have so many years left and even fewer productive years. Once you are over 25 you can slowly feel how things decay if you reach 40, 50, 60, 70 it goes downhill faster and faster. There may be dozens of years where nothing bad happens and then there are some weeks where your biological age increases by 10 years and it never really gets back to the level where you have been for so long. No matter what you do, no matter how healthy you are, how much care you take of yourself, one day it will hit you, too.
- coldtea 6y agoWhich is neither here, nor there. Parent just means if he gets terminal cancer or something.
- djmips 6y agoThe parent used terminally ill to mean; knowing he was going to die; we all know we are going to die, it's just a matter of how soon. We are all terminally ill.
- coldtea 6y agoNo, the parent used "terminally ill" to mean "knowing he was going to die SOON and ill". Which is different than merely "knowing he was going to die".
- ricardo81 6y agoTo be fair, in Earth's frame of reference they'd be hundreds, thousands, millions of years old by the time they entered the event horizon.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ungerik 6y agoIf you can, choose a big black hole. The smaller ones spagettify you faster.
- erostrate 6y agohttps://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt%284+distance+to+nearest+black+hole+%2F+%285+gravity+acceleration%29+%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt%284+distance+to+n... It would take about 30 years to get there, assuming constant acceleration & deceleration of 5g, so I hope you won't be dying too fast :)
- ejolto 6y agoThis ignores time dilation for the traveler. After 70 days 18 hours and 10 minutes at 5g you reach 0.9999c, time dilation at that speed is over 70x. Which means what looks like 30 years for us at earth only takes 30years/70 = ~ 5 months +70 days (if we ignore the time dilation leading up to 0.9999c) for the traveller. If you have a space ship that can accelerate at 5 g constantly, you can travel to the nearest black hole in lees than a year. In your reference frame
- erostrate 6y agoGood point thanks I missed that.
- zelphirkalt 6y agoPerhaps your terminally ill state will be stored in the black hole somehow and somehow you will be able to experiemce it, just like you wanted, feeling terminally ill, in pain, for an unspeakably long time, until your storage unit, the black hole evaporates finally.
- boobsbr 6y agoThanks, I hate it.
- gigatexal 6y agoI had an old team lead who would say that! Good memories
- ozorOzora 6y agoNow THAT is a dreadful read. Climate change not so bad after all.
- Aeolun 6y agoFor science!
- 0xdeadb00f 6y agoThis is such a great comment.
- ateng 6y agoNote to self: bring a pistol (or blaster?) with me when I head into a supermassive black hole.
- aqme28 6y agoThat's kind of how it works. Time will slow down for you as you get closer to the black hole. Everyone you know will die before you get to anywhere approaching the "center." Perhaps by then they'll have a cure and a way to pull you out.
- deleted 6y ago
- skc 6y agoI think this is every sci-fi geeks dream. I really want to know what's in there, especially since it's always said if the black hole is large enough, you would only theoretically experience mild discomfort past the event horizon
- nabla9 6y agoIf you throw dying people into black hole, they never die from the perspective of their family. They just move slower and slower. If civilization builds elderly-home-spaceships that fly into the black hole year after year, they can see all those people still alive in the event horizon. (Subjectively the elderly just go past the event horizon like it's not there)
- raattgift 6y ago> slower and slower And grow dimmer and redder and blurrier. There are several assumptions here, mostly having to do with the exterior Schwarzschild solution to the Einstein Field Equations of General Relativity serving as the source of most non-mathematical descriptions of black holes. The crucial assumptions: the black hole is eternal; it is maximally symmetrical (eternal means it's time-symmetrical, and the horizon being perfectly spherical gives spatial symmetries - let's also add in an absence of angular momentum and any non-gravitational charge); and it is the only substantial mass in its universe. "The perspective of their family" needs to be accelerated with respect to the central mass, for example by hovering directly over a point above the (non-rotating, spherically symmetrical, neither growing nor shrinking) horizon. The dying people also have to be in radial free-fall, so "throw" means just that[1], rather than a rocket-powered plunge or an eccentric hyperbolic trajectory. Breaking these conditions may provide the family of the infaller a very different view (for example, you could rocket the family in question into the same, or another, black hole such that they hit a central mass before light image of their infalling relative does; alternatively you could in principle, by throwing in other matter, make the black hole's mass and/or angular momentum grow quickly according to the watching family's wristwatches). > like it's not there The "no drama" conjecture for a freely-falling infaller depends on the global spacetime, and in general requires an arbitrarily large value for the central mass, so that the curvature scalars at the horizon are arbitrarily small. One can construct realistic black hole entries which are promptly extremely noticeable for the unfortunate infaller (or indeed for the black hole; infalling large masses will effectively raise bumps on the horizon that require on the order of a horizon-diameter light-crossing time to settle down by way of gravitational radiation, as is looked for at LIGO and Virgo). Inconveniently for understandings based on the Schwarzschild solution, lots of astrophysical black hole candidates appear to have enormous angular momentum. Additionally, they certainly aren't alone in our universe. Probably all of them are also still increasing in mass and angular momentum as things including distant starlight, cosmic microwave background and cosmic neutrino background radiation (and in the cases of astrophysical black holes in galaxy clusters dust, gas, stars, other black holes and so on) collide with them. This breaks several of the symmetries that lead to predictions of observations of an arrangement like M<->h<->i<------->a where M is the central mass, h is the horizon, i is the infaller freely-falling towards M, and a is the accelerated observer not moving towards M (it can however move away from M, relativistically if it wants[2]), all of which have Schwarzschild coordinates that differ only in "r". Finally, it's hard to find an astrophysical black hole without any sort of accretion structure around it, because isolated black holes are so very nearly black. It'll be harder to find an accretion structure which wouldn't obscure the view of the dying people in various ways as they approach the horizon, not to mention that our distant observer would almost certainly see a moving image of them being killed by bombardment with high energy electrons and X-Rays [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OtUVDRL_wM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OtUVDRL_wM ] well before their well-cooked corpses started to resemble a photograph. (It's also worth observing that the mass of an accretion structure is going to be much much larger than that of a spaceship full of dying people, as will the flux of mass falling onto plunging orbits. The large mass in the accretion structure will pull points of no return away from where they would be if the black hole were isolated from that mass; this is another aspect of raising bumps on the horizon. The large amount of inward-plunging mass will grow the horizon beyond where it would be for the case of an isolated black hole into which one throws a ship of sick people, much more quickly than "forever", even for a distant observer.) - -- [1] equip yourself with a smartphone with accelerometers, and an application like https://phyphox.org/ https://phyphox.org/ and throw your phone, and note what its accelerometer reports when you simply drop the phone versus when you throw the phone into the air, across a room, or into the hands of a collaborator. [2] You might consider a central black hole in a galaxy cluster at high redshift (i.e., billions of parsecs away), whose surrounding luminous matter is already seen by us as redder and dimmer because of the metric expansion of space, versus flying in an ultra-relativistic rocket towards a nearer black hole. Less extreme interactions of translational, accelerational and gravitational redshift interactions are dealt with in GPS [ http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.... for some numbers especially at footnote 2] and other GNSS systems.
- gigatexal 6y agoI had no idea this comment would take off. As I cross the event horizon I’d yell into the void: “Oh my god it’s full of stars!”
- gigatexal 6y agoAlso what people are missing is that current theory has us with theoretical models of what experiencing a black hole is like. And I did mention a super massive black hole so tidal forces would be minimal.
- yazaddaruvala 6y agoFWIW, you would be better off in a stasis chamber near the black hole waiting for 1 MM earth years to pass. You could then check in with the planet for a cure. It’s likely better to do it in a ship moving close to the speed of light. That comes back to earth every 1 MM earth years, intercepts pre-sent messages and if you like the state of earth then, get off the ship in an escape pod so the ship will never slow down.
- gigatexal 6y agoFor everyone spouting the current theory as to what it will be like: my terminally ill self (I’m not currently dying from anything other than entropy aka time) would be the only person from earth that would really know. Of course I couldn’t convey that knowledge but still. That’s the whole point.