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."
He'd die of old age.
The nearest black hole is 1600 light-years away. If our astronaught started to journey thence, at the beginning of the Bronze age, it would be conceivable that he'd arrive there sometime in the next couple hundred years - using the fastest of feasibly extrapolated propulsion technologies. This of course, supposing those could have existed after the retreat f European ice-sheets.
Any other planned method to acquire more rapid proximity to a black hole, probably wouldn't work out, either...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The funny thing is . . . if someone announced a space program to toss an astronaut down a black hole . . . there would be plenty of volunteers for the mission.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The gravitational force on physical objects would squeeze his body to a spaghetti far before the event horizon.
Hopefully quickly.
I love how we treat blackholes specially.
Why shouldn't we? They're extremely interesting.
For some reason, we teach kids and adults that blackholes are "evil" and suck up everything
At least that's less wrong than declaring that:
getting mass to 1/3 the speed of light is absolutely impossible.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.