Gravity is not a constant. What icon falls next? Weighty Matters Whadya know? New cutting-edge research seems to show conclusively that gravity doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. To wit, it is stronger at lower-than-average accelerations. Wow! That changes everything! For the skinny see this account. I can’t imagine a deeper revolution in physics,...
The JWT, no matter how technologically sophisticated and amazing it is, is showing only a tiny fraction of what it could. Shouldn’t it show us GPS-like maps and graphic pictures of travel directions? Here is my vision of the new super-duper images from, the (AI?) enhanced super-telescope. Dazzle Without the Frazzle! The JWT (James Webb Telescope) i...
Has the James Webb Telescope (JWT) just revealed a totally new universe which we can now physically see? Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall? The JWT was always going to be interesting because it can see so much that we’ve never seen. One of the things we wanted to see was the edges of our universe. Current theory says that limit happens to be around 13.5 ...
When/if we see aliens, they would have evolved from where they were when we first saw them. But could they have evolved backwards? There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills The James Webb telescope is getting into its stride. Now its discovered active atmospheres on exoplanets. The telescope has actually made an inventory of the chemicals in the atmosphere o...
Can Pandorans Speak Whale? It might be that the only way we can ever understand an alien language is by figuring out how to understand what terrestrial animals are actually saying. On a Planet, Far, Far Away You might have noticed that the movie “Avatar” is about to get a sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water”. Avatar is one of my old-time favorite movi...
Data from the James Webb Telescope suggest that there might not have been a Big Bang. What about countless tiny pops? The Big Bang is Dead, Long Live the Tiny Pops If you want to look truly up with the latest, just tell your credulous colleagues that the James Webb Telescope (JWT) shows us that the Big Bang didn’t happen. Instant street cred for su...
There’s RNA in space. What happens when black holes pull it in?
Did you see that astronomers have spotted a huge cloud containing RNA in the Milky Way? What’s that all about. Isn’t RNA supposed to be tucked away on terra firma comfortably in our warm cuddly bodies?
As we know RNA is a precursor of DNA and serves to manufacture proteins for our bodies. Could there possibly be embryos being formed in the cold vastness of space. Kind of unlikely one would think.
Oh yes and bye the way did you also know that there are giant molecules of alcohol (actually methyl alcohol) in space too? For someone to drink perhaps on those interminable voyages between star clusters (although this form of alcohol sends you blind)?
RNA is a relatively large molecule. We used to think that large molecules could not exist in space as they would be broken up by the many errant radiations out in the sticks. But now we know otherwise. We already knew that amino acid molecules are also out there. So, what else could be lurking?
How about DNA? Why not? And if there are DNA out there as well as RNA, could there also be free-floating life out there? Might it not be easier for these molecules to join up and self-assemble since they already do it on Earth and there are less pesky things to get in the way in space like viruses and bacteria.
But if you could get DNA floating around, why not even larger molecules? Ones that cannot exist on Earth, so we haven’t seen them. Could there be macro-molecules similar in concept to DNA that could form life forms orders of magnitude more complex than we have right now, as exemplified by that primitive multi-cellular organism called homo sapiens?
Could these massive molecules portend new life forms that are so complex they are unrecognizable by us humans? Ones that could be as large as a complete solar system with planets?
So, there are macro-molecules out there. What could it all mean?
It’s becoming increasingly clear that black holes are a critical part of the grand design. They have their own lifecycle, being born and then dying somehow although exactly how we don’t know. But it seems to be that there’s at least on mega-black hole at the center of each galaxy and they are part of galactic evolution. Without them you probably don’t get galaxies and by extension, us. So, they are part of the human story too, at least in our own galaxy.
Which brings me to the point. If a black hole is part of the human, if not at least the biological, story, is all that RNA and alcohol part of the deal too. If so, how?
Well one thing we’ve got to take into account is the sheer size of black holes. So far the biggest one we know of is 66 BILLION times the mass of the Sun. That’s a lot of Big Macs.
What does all that stuff do inside the black hole? (See my post “What’s really inside black holes?” 24 March 2018) We don’t know, but it must be interesting for sure. And since we haven’t seen many black holes, relatively speaking, maybe there are black holes that are still way larger!
But here’s where I’m going. These black holes are omnivorous as far as we know and pull in everything and anything around them. That would undoubtedly include clouds of RNA and alcohol. What happens to this stuff inside the hole. Does it form life for instance?
If there’s life inside the black hole that raises a whole range of scenarios. More humans perhaps? Dinosaurs? Trees 10,000 fee high/ God? The list goes on. In fact, those black holes might not be 66 billion tons of inert mass. It could be 66 billion tons of life! And since there’s a lot of big black holes around the various infinitude of galaxies, that means there could be a lot of life in the universe. That is, not just restricted to the odd, lonely exoplanet.
Of course, when said RNA is pulled into a black hole, maybe it is stripped down to its constituent electronic particles never to be seen again. Or maybe it remembers the form of the RNA and reconstructs it from epigenetic spatial memory. Or maybe by some mechanism of which we are yet, in our primeval ignorance, not aware, it protects itself and survives to become the Blob, just very, very large. And, just maybe, very, very intelligent.
So maybe we’re thinking the wrong way when we talk about life being found, on Mars, the occasional exoplanet, on under the oceans of watery moons. Perhaps the real answer is that we have to look inside black holes as being the most likely location of life, including intelligent life.
Now I am aware of course that thesekill-joy astronomers tell us that you can’t get inside black hole otherwise you’ll be stretched into spaghetti millions of miles long, and maybe they’re right. But could AI, computers and math look for it for us in weird and wonderful ways to tell us what forms of life could exist there? If we’re into discovering new stuff, shouldn’t we be doing that also? Especially if there could be Gods there, or ultrasmart beings that could solve all our problems including climate change and free food?
Could it be that most of the universe, not just black holes, is mainly made of living things and the rocky stuff is actually a minority? Could that mean that most of the universe is conscious, and likely sentient at the same time?
The James Webb telescope and astronomy are revolutionizing the way we think. Even if the meanderings here are totally idiotic, it’s clear that these sorts of questions are going to come up in an amplified sense.
Makes the woke stuff look trivial right?
My Point: If we do indeed meet them, this is something you want to know. Full Disclosure: My last post was about the James Webb Telescope and ETs (“Is the JWT (James Webb Space Telescope) a Sitting Duck for ETs?”). My friend, #Tony Barr, best known as the creator of the SAS language and the lead founder of the SAS Institute, asked me this question....
Is There Life Inside a Nuclear Reactor? Every day now we get articles in the press about the possibility of life on Mars, albeit invisible or defunct or both. There’s numerous people globally involved in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And the universe is so incomprehensively massive that, I’ve always though it’s impossible ...
UFOs are Officially Official So now UFOs are hitting the big time with a report from the US government on the topic. The report is now out but actually we’re none the wiser as to what these UFOs actually are. So, here’s my ha’penny’s worth. You know all those pesky drones out there buzzing overhead and invading your privacy? It’s probably them. But...
Just for Trekkies If you loved Star Trek the bad news is that it looks like Star Trek 4 will never see the light of day. The good news is that a practical warp drive might be on the way, well kind of. So, you won’t need to watch a movie to see the planet Vulcan in the star system 40 Eridani in the flesh. You will be able to go there and see it for ...
Why We Need Harvard I’m sure you’ve heard all the news about asteroid Oumuamua (rhymes with onomatopoeia, kind of) that paid our inconsequential little solar system a visit in 2017. At the time it just looked peculiar, like nothing we’ve ever seen. That’s because it was cigar-shaped, not spherical. Since when were asteroids not spherical? Since th...
I guess you’ve heard the US contention that Huawei chips have a back door that allows the Chinese government to sniff any and all communications through them. Maybe yes, maybe no. But no doubt its possible. I wonder if we are doing it too with the chips that American companies sell to companies overseas? Hmmm, interesting. Getting Deep into the Sub...
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” Arthur C. Clarke Thought I’d change pace for a post or two, so much bad news around, pandemic, fake news, elections. So, when I saw the article I’m going to tear apart (NOT), it looked like a welcome diversion. The article is about a spinning neutron star 4500 light-years from E...
Mars is cool right now. Soon we will launch its inevitable colonization. And then what? Prior human settlements (here on Earth) have usually been economically successful but socially a shambles. Will Mars be any different? The reigning Mars thesis du jour is that it used to be inhabited by intelligent beings – maybe an earlier form of human – who t...
I keep seeing these articles about whether we live in a simulation (by aliens, of course), or in a hologram. So, I figure it’s my turn to do a poor copy of same, like do we live in a Dr. Seuss sock? Well, maybe not, but why not “do we live in a black hole”? After all, we now know there’s oodles of them and we’re finding more every day. So, shouldn’t humans colonize them also just like we’re gonna do for Mars?
I thought I was being really original when I thought of this but, no, someone else had to go and think of it first. But I still have a new wrinkle.
Of course, there’s a slight problem about going to get inside a black hole in the first place. It’s that the black hole would elongate us to noodles an atom wide billions of miles long as we got close. And once we got inside it would squash us totally flat to nothing. So how then could we live in a black hole?
But what if we were already in a black hole, squashed into that length-less lump of matter at the core from the very get-go, as elemental nothingnesses within the Singularity? And what if the gravity inside the black hole started to get weaker so that we actually started to have length, width height and mass, as in 3D?
Could that lump of mass expand into things like stars, galaxies and planets inside the black hole? And if we humans started to emerge say 10 billion years later as denizens of one of these planets-in-a-hole, would we even know that we were inside the black hole?
It turns out that, even though from the outside, black holes don’t get much bigger unless they pull in a galaxy or two, on the inside they are constantly expanding their volume massively (“Why Black Hole Interiors Grow (Almost) Forever”). So that fits right? Even though it doesn’t make sense.
But, I can hear you saying, how could a black hole’s singularity start breaking down which would be needed for such things to occur? Surely that’s what black holes don’t do, like break down, right?
But the illustrious Dr. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes can indeed leak mass, in the form of Hawking radiation, and so the black holes can get lighter and mass can leak out, admittedly very slowly. That means the gravitational pressure inhibiting the growth of the singularity gets reduced a tad. Do we have evidence of that? Of course not! Could it happen? Why not, everything else does! We just haven’t found it yet.
So, if we humans lived inside a black hole like this one, we wouldn’t know we were in a black hole. And the Singularity we were part of would, while it was expanding, look like the Big Bang to us.
Our Black-Holian astronomers would be looking at all those galaxies flying away from us and talking excitedly about how far they would go and how and where our “universe” would all end. We would all be talking about the Hubble Constant, whether or not the value was correct, and whether or not the Big Bang would end in a Big Crunch.
Of course, if the latter were to happen, we would be back in a dimensionless singularity inside the black hole maybe 20 billion years later not knowing how the hell it all happened to us, yet again!
We would think we were in our own universe, which is currently expanding rapidly. And there would also be oodles of black holes in our universe all getting bigger, maybe with their own intelligent beings inside them too, like a cosmic Russian Doll.
Our theorists would all be talking about multiverses and would eventually find out that they are all inside the black holes within their own particular black hole universe. And then we would realize that all those galaxies out there just exist to feed black holes so they can eat matter in order to create new and bigger black holes that contain new universes all nested inside each other within each layer of nested black holes.
How many nested levels? 1,5, 10,000, infinity? Now there’s one for the mathematicians.
Oh, and by the way, what level are we, puny Carbon-Based Bipeds! (apologies to Arthur C. Clarke) at? Is there some sort of evolution that if you are at a deeper level the intelligent beings within it are smarter? Are later levels of nesting less or more evolved? Is there an ultimate numero uno in the nesting hierarchy? If so, could it be God? It’s certainly not us.
Complicated, right?
And then we would realize that every black hole represents at least one big bang of its own, and maybe a big crunch sometime later. So that the real action is inside all these black holes we continue to see more of.
And that our own black hole universe is just one of millions of such universes inside said black holes and that our black hole is totally insignificant in the overall scheme of things. So that our universe is no more the center of things than was the Sun in Galileo’s heliocentric universe, or the Earth in pre-Copernican times.
So, the real units of multiverse evolution are black holes. Each has a lifecycle of internal birth a la Big Bang, and a death cycle ending in the Big Crunch, all going on, as we speak, in the uncountable infinitude of black holes out there all constantly being created and dying in a vast population of constantly evolving cosmological units.
In other words, the black holes serve as convenient life rafts for humans and other intelligent beings that happen to be created within them. They and we all ride them for the brief moment in time (unless it all happens timelessly) between the infinity of Big Bangs and Big Crunches that are all going on around us.
But they all are invisible inside their Russian Dolls, just as we are invisible to all the intelligent observers inside all those black holes out there. Those intelligent observers will only ever see other intelligent beings within their own black hole universe, just as we will only ever see and meet intelligent beings from within our own black hole universe also.
Our idea of just one universe is as tragically limited as was that of our forebears who just thought there was one Earth, and no other planets.
Do we live in a nested black hole? If so, what level?
Anyway, why not?
Yep, I know, this topic is way too out there to even consider. Whatever. There’s so much news now about black holes, gravitational waves and the like that you just can’t help thinking of weird stuff, right? After all, newspapers (the few left, that is) still publish horoscopes and millions of apparently sane people believe implicitly in them. Aren’...
I guess everyone has seen the most recent reports by US Navy pilots about those UFO sightings. Sounds a bit more credible than usual. To my mind there’s so many galaxies and planets out there that if there weren’t any aliens, that would be the big surprise. Let’s assume for the moment that they were UFOs and real aliens. Why would they have come? M...
Fintech replace government? This seems fanciful, right? Even delusional? But get this: in China recently, a 5-year-old girl who needed brain surgery and had to pay what for her parents was an impossible sum to get, received the surgery courtesy of millions of people who each paid 0.03 yuan per person. They thus met the medical bills of around 300,0...
Do black holes affect personality? I guess black holes are cool and fashionable right now, at least to judge by the volume of black holes news being fed to me online these days. So, I feel the need to write about black holes, not that I know the slightest thing about them. But who cares, I say. And the news, such as it might go by that name, is get...
