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Hairy Black Holes and the horror of living forever

Nov 5, 2024

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I think a lot of us think of blackholes as giant vacuum cleaners sucking up matter and growing bigger in the process. This is partly true in that anything, including light, that goes past it's 'event horizon' can never escape the pull of gravity. This is exactly like going past the opening of the confectionary isle at the super market. However a lot of matter ends up just orbiting it in massive clouds of plasma stuff like when you go on a diet and are studiously trying to avoid the chocolate. Even when you don't fall in, the gravity of it weighs heavily on the mind. Because of the friction created by this whirling stuff, blackholes are actually some of the brightest objects in space. Black holes indeed! Ok so lets look at our solar system. The sun is constantly burning up tons of stuff, not like a fire, but more through nuclear fusion which takes elements and smooshes them together to make elements with greater mass which releases a technical fuck ton of energy. This reaction creates a sort of internal pressure which counteracts the forces of gravity. Eventually though all this matter will be refined down to the point where you can't smoosh things further into heavier elements (I think it tends to reach iron then stop, but don't quote me on it). The lack of the internal pressure might then mean it goes super nova and blows it's load all over the cosmos, and some of it may collapse into a black hole. Now I'm not sure our sun has enough mass for this but lets say it did. Our earth would continue to orbit this blackhole like it did the sun (assuming though that this hole still had the mass of our current sun and ignoring that earth would of long ago been consumed by the expansion of the sun which kind of behaes just like us who get fatter as we age and shrink in our dotage). However it would probably be fucking dark and cold! Even though nothing can escape a blackhole they actually do 'evaporate', at least in theory, through hawking radiation. Some astrophysicists have described them as being hairy black holes - True story, maybe careful how you google it. Astrophysics is a dirty business. Now we are getting to the crux of the matter. You can make the logical leap to say after uncountable time, when all the stuff has coalesced into new suns which collapse into blackholes which then evaporate through their supreme sweatiness (eat a lot of pies and you too become sweaty). After cycles of this the universe kind of becomes this big mostly empty nothing. Not even farts. A little known fact is that if you have enough farts you could in theory create a black hole giving us an uncomfortable chicken and egg situation i.e. gassy people create arseholes which is a good reason to watch what you eat. Now as uncomfortable I am with the thought of death, nothing could be worse than living forever in a conscious eternity of nothing. Without chocolate isle and not even a hairy black hole to admire. I'm truly thankful to be living at this time with plenty of chocolate, plenty of holes to observe and lots of you people to share this experience with.




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Comments (1)

Madmanz
Nov 12, 2024

I too am happy for coholate and /holes to observe… well more than observe…

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Prince Rupert's drops are glass beads created by dripping melted glass into cold water, which causes it to solidify into a tadpole shaped droplet with a long, thin tail. These droplets are characterized internally by very high residual stresses, which gives them some radical properties. You can strike the fat end with a hammer and it won't break, but it will explosively disintegrate if the tail end is even slightly damaged like a fragile male ego. 

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