Volt Cruelerz
Software Engineer Hoosier in Florida
- Location
- Florida
Let's say I've got a supermassive black hole. I decide I want to watch the heat death of the universe, so I fly my rocket to the black hole and cut the power to the engines, just letting me slowly accelerate toward the center of the black hole by gravity alone. For simplicity, let's say there's no accretion disk to run into.
Can I ever actually be eaten by the black hole? Perhaps this sounds silly, but the idea of a black hole ever actually eating anything has always seemed impossible to me. Provided that it's a sufficiently large black hole, I won't be spaghettified outside the event horizon because the difference in acceleration between my head and feet won't be significant so my blood will keep pumping and I won't get stretched out and die painfully. As a result, I just get to sit happily in my ship until I hit the event horizon, at which point I would obviously die.
But I don't think I'd ever actually touch it. You see, as I get nearer and nearer, I'd accelerate and accelerate. As I near the event horizon, I'll be falling toward it at 99.9999...% c. But the thing is, as my velocity keeps going up, I start to move noticeably in time as well as space and I see the universe age much much faster. As I get closer and closer, I move faster and faster, but the universe now seems to be whizzing forward in time, aging incredibly rapidly. Wouldn't it be the case that as I get closer and closer to the speed of light, that time would continue to slow down so much that you could never actually be eaten by a black hole and instead move so far forward in time that the black hole would literally evaporate below you such that falling toward a non-spaghettifying black hole would allow you to actually witness its death billions of years in the future?
More generally, wouldn't time dilation make it impossible for a black hole to ever actually eat anything with mass so tossing a baseball at a black hole would ultimately just amount to hurling the baseball into a one-way time machine to billions of years in the future to when the black hole finally evaporates so much that it dies?
On the subject of black hole evaporation, black holes have a ton of mass and I imagine that when they evaporate so much that they finally cease to accelerate things faster than c, they would explode violently from all the pressure they've been holding back. But what if this could be triggered sooner? A black hole is simply an object that accelerates something "faster" than the speed of light so it can't escape the event horizon. But let's say you have a black hole that is very very negatively charged. You then proceed to get a giant ball of protons and throw the protons at the negatively-charged black hole. What happens? It's said that you can't ever pull things out of a black hole (due to the warping of spacetime to be "vertical," but couldn't you theoretically create an equally powerful force using one of the other fundamental forces? In such a scenario, would you actually be able to pull electrons out of the event horizon or would the black hole itself move toward the proton ball without actually giving up any of its contents?
Can I ever actually be eaten by the black hole? Perhaps this sounds silly, but the idea of a black hole ever actually eating anything has always seemed impossible to me. Provided that it's a sufficiently large black hole, I won't be spaghettified outside the event horizon because the difference in acceleration between my head and feet won't be significant so my blood will keep pumping and I won't get stretched out and die painfully. As a result, I just get to sit happily in my ship until I hit the event horizon, at which point I would obviously die.
But I don't think I'd ever actually touch it. You see, as I get nearer and nearer, I'd accelerate and accelerate. As I near the event horizon, I'll be falling toward it at 99.9999...% c. But the thing is, as my velocity keeps going up, I start to move noticeably in time as well as space and I see the universe age much much faster. As I get closer and closer, I move faster and faster, but the universe now seems to be whizzing forward in time, aging incredibly rapidly. Wouldn't it be the case that as I get closer and closer to the speed of light, that time would continue to slow down so much that you could never actually be eaten by a black hole and instead move so far forward in time that the black hole would literally evaporate below you such that falling toward a non-spaghettifying black hole would allow you to actually witness its death billions of years in the future?
More generally, wouldn't time dilation make it impossible for a black hole to ever actually eat anything with mass so tossing a baseball at a black hole would ultimately just amount to hurling the baseball into a one-way time machine to billions of years in the future to when the black hole finally evaporates so much that it dies?
On the subject of black hole evaporation, black holes have a ton of mass and I imagine that when they evaporate so much that they finally cease to accelerate things faster than c, they would explode violently from all the pressure they've been holding back. But what if this could be triggered sooner? A black hole is simply an object that accelerates something "faster" than the speed of light so it can't escape the event horizon. But let's say you have a black hole that is very very negatively charged. You then proceed to get a giant ball of protons and throw the protons at the negatively-charged black hole. What happens? It's said that you can't ever pull things out of a black hole (due to the warping of spacetime to be "vertical," but couldn't you theoretically create an equally powerful force using one of the other fundamental forces? In such a scenario, would you actually be able to pull electrons out of the event horizon or would the black hole itself move toward the proton ball without actually giving up any of its contents?
Last edited:
