> black holes that do not gain mass through other means are expected to shrink and ultimately vanish I agree with the first half but not the last. We know that

> black holes that do not gain mass through other means are expected to shrink and ultimately vanish I agree with the first half but not the last. We know that the methods used to predict Hawking radiation are no longer valid in the regime of tiny black holes (curvature becomes extremely high near the event horizon but Hawking's computation assumes near-zero curvature), so the claim of black holes vanishing is a guess at best (and one that leads right to the black hole information paradox). Another option would be that we'll be left with a black hole remnant. Or maybe something else happens. Without a quantum theory of gravity we can't possibly know.