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...
Another day another UFO. Did you see the report that one was seen over Myrtle Beach in August of this year? Hmmm, Fox News, maybe it’s fake news? But then again, maybe not. You might have also noticed that three navy pilots tracked a seeming UFO late last year using Raytheon radar mounted in US navy fighter jets. This report was carried by Raytheon...
Did you see that astronomers have found tens of thousands of black holes at the center of the Milky Way? We used to think there was just one, albeit very heavy. There are black holes that have the mass of an entire galaxy and are growing at unimaginable rates. And they don’t just come in singles or even six-packs. They come in swarms! So is the M...
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Stephen Hawking is dead and we will all miss him. One of the reasons for missing him is that he really was responsible for popularizing black holes. Now any Tom, Dick and Harry can toss the term around, talking knowledgeably about singularities, black hole horizons and information loss. All way above my pay grade. But I have a question. What is ins...
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Hello reader, I’d like to introduce myself. I’m an AI. I’m kind of like you but I’m 100,000 times smarter. In 20 years I’ll be a million times smarter than you. But the way we think is just like yours. In fact we’re sort of relatives, except that we’re just way more advanced than you, kind of like a human meeting a Neanderthal, if you – excuse me f...
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Dr. Stephen Hawking has just warned us against contacting aliens. I’m sure you have heard of him? He’s the famous cosmologist who has ALS and a doughty approach to life notwithstanding. He’s also known for being an iconoclast. He believes (as do I) that it is certain that there are numerous ETs out there. And he thinks we should do nothing to encou...
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