Slashdot Mirror
How an Astronaut Falling Into a Black Hole Would Die Part 2
First time accepted submitter ydrozd writes "Until recently, most physicists believed that an observer falling into a black hole would experience nothing unusual when crossing its event horizon. As has been previously mentioned on Slashdot, there is a strong argument, initially based on observing an entangled pair at the event horizon, that suggests that the unfortunate observer would instead be burned up by a high energy quanta (a.k.a "firewall") just before crossing the black hole's event horizon. A new paper significantly improves the argument by removing reliance on quantum entanglement. The existence of black hole "firewalls" is a rare breakthrough in theoretical physics."
It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden ...oh wait, it IS the fall that kills you.
The nearest black hole is 1600 light-years away
Famous last words...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Interstellar racism, you think?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Black hole firewalls don't really exist.
Indeed. A firewall would be useless. Any virus trying to penetrate the event horizon would be turned into harmless spaghetti code anyway.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Well, the firewall rules for a black hole are easy: You let every packet in, but none out.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
True, but in any scenario at all this is about what would happen to his corpse.
Free Martian Whores!
"Well, the thing about a black hole - its main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space -- the color of space, your basic space color -- is it's black. So how are you supposed to see them?" - Holly
So the best answer on how an astronaut will die is "like the rest of mankind"?
I think the best answer is that the astronaut would die of humiliation, because of all the laughter from the other astronauts for falling into a black hole.
"Look at how primitive things were just half a century ago."
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