Life Inside Black Holes

Did you ever wonder what life would be like inside a black hole?

When a space ship is flying toward a black hole, the disk of darkness ahead of them continues to grow in appearance until it covers their entire forward view. It appears to them as if they have reached the very edge of space, because all the visible starlight has moved behind them. This will happen while they are still far above the event horizon because of the vastness of scale compared to the size of the ship.

Then at the moment that they pass into the event horizon, suddenly the entire contents of the shell of darkness comes into view. They will observe the brightness of the singularity, and they will see everything else that has recently entered the horizon. Also, they will still be able to see the all of the outside stars, because nothing is stopping that light from entering. The mass in the singularity is not the only gravitational force within the event horizon, that is a terribly simplified model. Rather, all of the objects that have been recently pulled within the horizon have not yet reached the singularity, They are all spiralling in from different angles. The light from all of the captured stars, planets and moons is also trapped within the sphere. Travelers there observe multiple images of everything there because of gravitational lensing.

Depending on the mass of the black hole, the volume of space within the event horizon will be small or large. They range from star size, to solar system size, to galaxy size, and larger. Also the extra curvature of space makes the inside larger than the outside. The degree of curvature does not appear as roundness, but rather as a tidal force.

You may be thinking that the ship and any planets, moons, and stars, would be torn apart by tidal forces long before they reached the event horizon. But that only happens with the smaller black holes. The larger the mass, the larger the radius from the singularity to the horizon. The smaller the ratio of the length of the falling object to its distance from the singularity, the smaller the tidal forces. So with objects of the same size falling into different sized black holes, the larger the event horizon, the smaller the tidal forces. And although it is counterintuitive, it follows that the more massive the black hole, the smaller the tidal forces at its horizon.

Consider an event horizon the size of a galaxy, say 100,000 light years in diameter. What would the gravitational pull be on the front end of your ship, and on the back end? It would be exactly strong enough to hold light back. There would be virtually no difference at all front to back, and that means no tidal force. Although you would be in free fall nearing light speed, you are experiencing more tidal force just standing on earth than you would there. Even a planet or star at that distance would experience virtually no tidal force from the singularity. When you enter the galaxy sized event horizon and suddenly see all the stars and planets within it, you will be 50,000 light years from the singularity. So even if you are traveling near light speed, you will have time to live out your entire life, and several thousand generations of your descendants would also live out their lives, before your ship gets close enough to notice any tidal force.

A black hole 10 times that size could swallow a small star sized black hole. And that small black hole would have 500,000 years within the larger shell to reach its center point. But if it came in at an angle it would follow a much longer spiralling path to the center. Depending on the angle, it would have 50, 100, or even 1000 times longer to feast on other objects it finds within the larger shell, before it reaches the more massive singularity. A lifeless solar system entering the horizon would also have 500,000 years or more to develop primordial slime, and evolve an entire ecosystem on one of its planets, and evolve intelligent beings who look out at the sky. They would notice the stars, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and some black holes, and they would debate as to whether their planet is the center of the universe.

Consider a black hole with an event horizon the size of the entire universe. In fact the idea that the entire universe is within the event horizon of a black hole should not come as any surprise, because for decades theoretical physicists and cosmologists have been describing that precise thing, only in different terms. It has in other terms been the great question of cosmology since the Big Bang was theorized. "Will the universe stop expanding?" Living within an event horizon, you would expect all of the weird laws of physics that have been recently discovered. The portion of the universe which is visible to us is such a miniscule fraction of the whole, that although we can tell how space is curved locally, we can not expect to detect the topology of the whole universe.

Due to relativity, people can't detect that their planets and galaxies and all of the stars, small black holes, and everything within the miniscule fraction of the universe that is visible to them, are all traveling toward the center at near light speed. They can't see the singularity even though they are within the event horizon, because it is much farther away than the most distant visible objects. The amount of gravitational lensing would be reduced to only local effects for the same reason. They can't detect the singularity's tidal force on them because they are so far from it. But they do notice an effect of the tidal force on a cosmic scale. When they look at distant stars, the ones behind them are going slower than they are, and the ones ahead of them are going faster. Every visible thing is racing in one direction off to one side. All accelerating with the observers in the middle of the pack. They Spiral in their local galaxy which is blocking most of their view. So the only cosmic view they have is a cone in front and a cone behind within a limited range. On this largest visible scale the tidal force spreads stars away from each other. The effect that they observe is of course red shift. When they notice that more distant stars are more red shifted they assume that the universe is expanding and they debate as to whether their universe would expand forever. Little do they imagine that the opposite is true, that they are in the midst of a big crunch. And that the observed red shift is the manifestation of tidal forces in action on their miniscule visible portion. And that in fact everything is already going down the universal drain. As we get closer, the cosmic tidal force will only continue to increase. Scientists seeing that the rate of divergence increases, may begin to theorize about some kind of antigravity.

So these people, who think that their universe is expanding, consider the question about the end of the universe. "Will the universe stop expanding?" The question leads us ... not to its own answer, but instead to the answer of our first question: "What is life like inside the event horizon of a black hole?" According to current scientific theory, there are three possible outcomes to the universe, depending on the total amount of gravity in it. 1) Continued expansion, 2) eventual equilibrium, or 3) a big crunch. In the second and third scenarios, gravity holds everything in the universe, even light, from escaping an eventual maximum size. That is by definition the event horizon of a black hole. In fact, since no one has proven which of the three theories is true, that means that nobody knows if the entire universe is within the event horizon of a black hole or not.

In scenario 1, the people have no way of knowing that they are not living inside a black hole. And in scenarios 2 and 3, the people have no way of knowing that they actually are living inside a black hole. So now you know what life would be like inside a black hole, it would be just exactly like your life right now, because odds are 2 out of 3 that you really are in one.