Perthblog

Obesity is the new abnormal Did you notice the latest gloomy news on obesity? Namely, that on current predictions half of all adults in the US will be clinically obese by 2030. There’s even worse too; one quarter of all adults will be severely obese. That means they are at least 100 lbs. over their ideal body weight and experiencing conditions such...

You know a field of knowledge is being popularized for the Great Unwashed once psychologists start to talk knowledgeably about it. So, it goes with quantum stuff; what was once the province only of the hard science literati has now entered the sphere of pop media. Quantum Cats Well kind of; cast a glance or two at this one - 'What is quantum cognit...

One of the benefits of living in a rich country is that you get a lot of high quality, nutritious food. As nations become more highly developed, they eat a lot more meat, which, as we know is nutritious and particularly high in protein. Even though there’s a bit of a trend towards a plant-based diet, the mega-trend is to eat more protein, not just ...

The Plaque Obsession I’ve been really concerned about the lack of progress on Alzheimer’s. So in early 2018 I posted on the topic (“We urgently need a Manhattan Project for Alzheimer's!” 13 January, 2018). In my post I pointed out the research into the disease wasn’t working out because it was concerned only with amyloid plaque, that none of the dr...

  This AI stuff is so complicated, sigh…There’s all these newfangled algorithms, deep learning, generative adversarial networks, it goes on and on. Isn’t it kind of depressing to feel that without all this stuff, we can’t go to Mars, cure cancer, or invent the next Impossible Burger? And that’s just with the ongoing generation of AI. What about the...

I just watched a Netflix documentary called "The Game Changers". Its about how meat damages your body.  As if we needed another bad health story. I don’t have to tell you that vaping is in the news. Now we know that it does major damage to your lungs in the longer-term, albeit not as bad as tobacco. How about this meat thing though? You know, all t...

There’s a lot of buzz around Alexa. So is Alexa listening to you? Even recording your calls? What for? Where is she going anyway? Obviously she is getting much smarter. Real conversation is in the offing. So, she’s not just a fount of information, but also maybe a fount of wisdom. The role of digital companion is nigh. Digital soulmate is on the ho...

OMG somatic cognition! What the *** is this guy talking about? And what has it got to do with me anyways? I’ve already written on this broad topic (19 September 2015  “What have Octopuses got to do with Leadership?”). The basis is embodied cognition, the idea that much of our thinking goes on in parts of our body other than the brain. Just like an ...

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...

Emotional intelligence is hot. Thousands of companies doing training in it. Maybe millions learning all about it. So EQs should be rising right? Well I don’t know of anyone who publishes an index of global EQ. My guess is that if they did, it would be declining. How can that be? Surely, we humans are on a one-way street getting ever nicer to one an...

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?

So you know that robots are here to stay once you see an article about teaching kids the need to refer to them as “it”. How about “Sir” in that case? Your Honor perhaps? But why not “she” or “her”? Shouldn’t we be designing and making AIs and robots as males and females? Aren’t the genders different enough that they require their own manifestation ...

We live in a scary world. There’s nothing like a scary movie, right? Hear about the latest Godzilla: King of the Monsters? So here’s the latest kind of Godzilla, courtesy of the Russians, namely hypersonic missiles . They go at Mach 5 speed, seriously fast, and you can’t knock them down. That’s scary. Oh, and did we mention that they seem to be nuc...

Did you see that an interplanetary society has just launch a prototype starship powered by a solar sail, aka LightSail? For the ignorami, that’s a gossamer-thin piece of material that catches the light of the Sun which provide propulsive power to the starship. And no, it’s not a new idea. Kepler referred to it, and sci-fi writers such as Jules Vern...

Did you see that amazing photo of two entangled photons? If you did maybe like me you had no idea what you were looking at, just that it’s amazing to even think that it would be possible to do such a thing! Maybe it’s a hoax like NASA landing on the moon (not!). What is entanglement anyway? Even Einstein didn’t believe in it. Yet, here it is surfac...

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’m sure everyone has heard of mindfulness. It’s the new religion for curing stress, of which there seems to be quite a lot. Salespeople are hardly known for being meditative, so when they pick up knitting as a (secular) religion, you know there’s something going on. The buzzword is mindful knitting, by the way. And that’s not all, not even the lea...

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...

So, measles is getting out of control again. Ebola is already out of control. All those diseases of childhood are making a return in some shape or form, like measles and chicken pox, even polio. Antibiotic resistant bugs are getting nastier. The cognoscenti is already parsing the meaning of the post-antibiotic era. Meanwhile the latest drugs for Al...

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...