Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and guest host Katie Goldin talk about astro-blackhole-biology and whether it's possible to have life evolve inside a black hole.
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Hey Daniel, what's the most creative depiction of aliens you've ever read in sci fi?
Good question? Well, I really like Greg Egan's living computer in his novel Diaspora. I'd say more, but I don't want to spoil it for everyone who hasn't read it yet.
Ooh, I'm gonna have to check that out. Okay, So what's the least creative alien you've ever encountered?
Probably a tie between Superman and Star Trek.
Oh.
Yeah. Not a fan of the humanoid aliens.
No, it feels so self serving and parochial. It's like imagining that everyone out there in the world eats the same food that you and your family.
Do you mean everyone eating a pure diet of cheese whiz and dauritas. I can see how that'd.
Be a problem, exactly. I'd rather live in an exciting world where the aliens eat even weirder food than cheese whiz.
Well, I just hope their food is good.
Put enough hot sauce or cheese whiz on anything, it probably tastes good.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm the co host of this podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe, in which we talk about all the crazy and amazing things out there in the universe, everything we seek to understand and everything that we have figured out. Everything from the insides of neutron stars to the tiniest little particles to the various forms of Alien Life. My usual co host, Jorge cham the Cartoonist, isn't here today, but I'm very happy to welcome back our returning guest host, Katie Golden. Katie, welcome back to the program.
It's a pleasure to be here. It's always a good time. I'm especially excited about today's episode.
Yeah, welcome back. Remind the viewers about your area of expertise, the other fun podcasts.
That you do.
Yeah. So, I'm Katie Golden. I host a podcast called Creature Feature where I talk about all the weird and wild animals in the world, their behavior, their lives, their evolutionary history, and how they relate to humans.
And what is the weirdest animal that you guys have talked about on your podcast.
Oh, that's a good question. I think my eternal favorite is the tartar grade, which your listeners have probably heard about. It's that tiny microorganism that is in fact an animal, and it looks like a cute, little multi legged bear, and it is about the size of like the tip of an eyelash, and it can survive radiation, it can survive the vacuum of space, it can survive extreme heat and cold, and it can go into suspended animation for years and years, maybe even centuries, and then because revived once you rehydrate it.
And aren't there some of those on the moon like right now?
Potentially right we had some of those as experiments on something, right and then like that may have collided with the Moon at some point.
Yeah, I think that is really land or had tartar grades on it, and it didn't land so gently on the Moon. So next time we go up there, we may find a massive tartar grade civilization, just.
Little tiny tartar grades with little tiny tartar grade cars going to tartar grade work.
Maybe they have their own cheese whiz factory. Well, bringing it all together, can tartar grades eat cheese whiz?
I don't know. They typically live on moss and eat little tiny microorganisms on moss, but I'm sure if you gave it some cheese whiz, it wouldn't complain.
Well, my goal in today's podcast, Katie, is to ask you a bunch of biology questions nobody has ever asked anybody before like that one.
Well, I'm excited and I'm sure I could answer all of them perfectly.
And on today's place, we are going to be exploring the outer bounds of what is possible when it comes to life and alien life. On this podcast, we'd like to think about all the craziest ideas. We'd like to cast off the shackles of our preconceptions and imagine what life might be like out there in the universe, because it's one of the deepest questions of modern science. Are we alone in the universe? Is Earth the only place that hosts life in this entire glittering cosmos? Or is it teeming with life, absolutely festooned and infiltrated with microbes and animals and crazy stuff out there. I for one, am hoping that the universe is filled with all sorts of creative stuff, because I love the surprises that science offers. We're always discovering weird new things around the corner and under our rock, and I'm looking forward to seeing weird stuff out there. So what's your personal opinion, Katie? Do you think life is common in the universe and everywhere or very rare and special.
I think life probably is able to find niches in the universe, So while I don't, I think given the size of the universe, I'm sure it's found relatively frequently because of how big the universe is. But I think the space between where you find that life is probably rather vast. So when you think about Earth and these most inhospitable environments like the deep sea, where you wouldn't expect anything to survive because it's cold and dark, you actually do find pockets of vibrant life near these thermal vents where they are all clustered around these little niches where life can survive. And that's how I would imagine the universe, where you find a little niche that life could possibly be in, and I think it would become filled with something, maybe cheese was Aliens.
But isn't there an implicit assumption there that you're making that you're looking for life like life on Earth when you're saying the universe is asked, And I think the implicit argument there is that there must be other Earth life places, places where life like ours can flourish. What do you think of the possibility that life could be like vastly different, like completely mind bogglingly surprisingly different, more creative even than our best science fiction authors could concoct.
I really think there's something to that, because even when you look at life on Earth, you find things that completely break the mold of what we think life should be. There's this micro organism that is actually a parasite of salmon. And as far as we have understood, all life has to be able to have a metabolism, be able to process ATP in order to live. But it's called this like tapioca parasite because when you open up the fish, it actually kind of looks like tapioca, which is gross. But these little tiny they almost look like little sperms. Are these Nigerians that have lost the ability to have a metabolism, so they literally have no metabolism. It doesn't seem like they should be alive, and yet they're somehow able to directly steal ATP from their host, the salmon. So even on Earth we find things that we like all the time we previously thought could not exist in any way. It defies our concept of what life is. It even defies how we define life. And so I think in the universe there's definitely life out there that maybe wouldn't pass like if you took a high school biology class, where it's like what is life? You know, well, it can reproduce, it can eat, you know it can grow blah blah blah. If you expand that definition to something like, well, what about something that's conscious or you know? Is the kind of eternal argument about well, is a virus a life form? You know? Or is this organic virus a life form? Well, then is as a computer virus life for I think that once we open our minds to other definitions of life, then that opens up way more possibilities in the universe.
I totally agree, and I'm excited to be surprised by where life is found and what forms it takes. But it's going to require us to be a little bit creative in advance, because if we're gonna look for life, that we gotta know sort of what we are looking for. It's very difficult to keep your mind open to like every possibility. We don't necessarily know what this life is made out of. I mean, think about, like, from a particle physics point of view, how much about our world around us here on Earth is invisible to us. We are being cascaded and bombarded by neutrinos all the time. We are surrounded by dark matter and dark energy, things we didn't know about because we didn't know to look for them. It seems to me entirely possible that there are forms of life out there, processes which satisfy all the requirements, but we just haven't imagined them, so we don't know how to look for them. Things on vast scales, things and in uspitable places, things that would just blow our minds. And so on today's podcast, we're going to try to do some of that creative mind stretching to imagine if life could live in the weirdest, most inhospitable, most surprising of corners of the universe. So today's episode we'll be asking can life exist inside a black hole?
Wow, that's a tough one. My immediate response is like, well no, But then when you think about it, maybe.
Yeah, right exactly. I want to push everybody to think about what does life even mean and how do we know it couldn't exist inside a black hole? What if the universe is filled with black holes that are all filled with life and we are the only non black hole life in the universe. That sounds like a cool science fiction novel.
Does that mean we were the aliens? The whole time?
You're just waiting for that twist? It means you're the alien and this whole thing is like the Truman Show where we're all watching you.
Whoa are we just on the inside a Petrie dish on a giant like Aliens lab table.
If so, I hope they feed us the more cheese with.
So here's what people had to say when they were asked can life exist inside a black hole?
If you'd like to volunteer and answer weird, funny, bizarre physics questions with no ability to do any background reading at all, just on the spot, please write to me two questions at Danielandjorge dot com. Trust me, it's fun.
I'm gonna go with no based on the fact that any life going into the black hole would get ripped apart, spaghetti fied, and destroyed. So unless there's something crazy going on once you get to the center of that black hole where it's connected to a white hole in some other universe or something crazy like that, then I'm going to say no.
I think the gravitational forces towards the similarity would be too strong for life to persist, so inside the black hole would be a rather short one. The life would be only short for that being that is experiencing those forces right, A lot more time would have passed for anyone outside of black hole in the meantime.
And well, I don't think so. But I heard people saying it is possible, it is possible to be even a different universe, but but I don't think so.
Yes, I think so, but I don't think it would last very long. Like once you cross the event horizon, I guess you could say you're inside the black hole, but I don't think that's where you want to be.
I was just watching the Isaac Asmov Memorial debate for twenty twenty, and they were discussing what is life from both the philosophical standpoint and a scientific standpoint. I'd say, as we know it now. But I suppose if you redefine life any as possible. But I have strong doubts anything could do anything. I doubt things exist inside a black hole.
Absolutely not. That's nuts, that's crazy. That would never work. It would all be squished completely. I know that if you go anywhere near a black hole, you get spaghettified and kind of pulled out. You know, all your atoms end up kind of getting pulled into a long string. So I can't imagine that anything would survive in a black hole.
My first thought is no, because of just the sheer heat and intensity of the accretion disk and everything leading into a black hole, I would think that the inside of a black hole is just a continuation thereof because the event horizon is just basically the point at which light can't escape, So we can't really know information wise what's going on after that point. But my intuition, even though a lot of things in ast physics and microphysics is not intuitive, is that everything would just destroy and implode in on it self and just continue to do so as it got smaller and smaller. So I don't think that life could survive or evolve in that kind of environment. No.
Wow, So a lot of people seem to agree with your initial reaction, Katie. There's not a lot of hope here for life inside black holes.
Yeah.
They all seem pretty afraid of the spaghettification process, which is understandable. You know, if I think about getting turned into spaghetti, I feel that's not very survivable. But we're not just talking about my life, like there could be some kind of life that enjoys being spaghetti.
Right, So you're saying when you come home after a long day, you know, like, ah, man, I want to relax on the couch and get turned into spaghetti.
Ah, I mean maybe a little bit.
But I think that's good of you to, you know, imagine that there is some kind of life out there for which that is a pleasant evening.
Exactly. Yeah, just kick back in Linguini a bit.
Maybe spaghetti shaped life, right, What would happen if you tossed spaghetti into a black hole?
Hmmm, then you'd get like a rotini. I'm not sure I know neither enough about pastas or physics to answer that.
All right, you're gonna have to learn some more pasta words if your mov in Italy. So our listeners are pretty skeptical that it's possible to live inside a black hole or I think some of these answers are about surviving entry into a black hole, But I was thinking more about life evolving and being inside a black hole for like its entire existence.
Yeah, exactly.
So.
I feel that when we think about life, like we were talking about earlier, we think about aliens that are vaguely human shaped or maybe like an octopus shape, but it's essentially following the mold of something on Earth, whether it's a humanoid from star trek or you know, the little like Brin shrimp aliens from Alien, the face hugger, which is basically, if you don't know, just to scaled up Brian shrimp.
Are you saying that those things are real?
Well, if you look at a Brian shrimp or a sea monkey, it looks pretty much exactly like the face huggers from Alien.
But they don't actually hug faces, do they.
Well, they do, but it's cute because they're so small.
So many things that are cute would be terrifying if they were larger. Right, take, for example, your housecat. Your housecat pretty cute because it's not a mountain lion otherwise totally terrifying, exactly the same personality.
Yes, although if you scale up my dog, the only scary part would be the amount of slobbery you'd have to endure.
You might need like scuba equipment or something. All right, well, maybe we should remind people what is dangerous about living inside a black hole? What sort of hurdles life would have to overcome if it did want to survive inside a black hole?
Yeah, because doesn't it kind of rip you to little shreds in some sort of way?
Yeah, so I think there are two major things you have to worry about if you're going to live inside a black hole. But first let's remind ourselves, like what a black hole is. But the basic physics is here. Remember that a black hole, though famous for being something that just like sucks everything in, is really just a compact object, and objects with mass, like everything in the universe, have gravity. So a black hole isn't like a big suction hole in space or a big vacuum cleaner. It pulls on everything just because it has gravity the same way you do, the same way the Earth does, the same way the Sun does. That doesn't necessarily mean that everything is going to fall into a black hole. For example, you could orbit a black hole just the same way you orbit the Sun. Right, the Sun is pulling on you with its gravity, but we are not plummeting into the Sun to our fiery deaths because we have enough speed to orbit the Sun instead. So black hole does have a very strong gravitational field, but it's not so powerful that it's going to overcome everything, at least outside the event horizon. There is this boundary, this event horizon we call it. If you get close enough to the black hole, if you've happen to pass through this event horizon, then you can never escape, and every path in front of you eventually leads to the singularity at the heart of the black hole. But remember that black holes are just made out of normal stuff. They're not weird in that way. They're just really compact objects, which allows you to get sort of like closer to the source of gravity than you would otherwise. So it's that really intense gravity that is what you have to worry about. And so there are sort of two different categories of things to worry about there. One is what you're mentioning, Katie getting turned into spaghetti or linguini or maybe angel hair pasta. And that's because of these things called tidal forces. Title forces come up when you're not like a point particle and you have like a physical extent, so that one part of you could be closer to the black hole than the other part. Because gravity gets stronger as you get closer, than the black hole is going to be pulling on the part of you that's closer harder than it's pulling on the part of you that's further away, and so in effect, it's sort of tugging you apart. Basically, it's like it's trying to pull your head off all the time.
So fight jackknife into a black hole and like headfirst in a perfectly executed dive with my hands like right in front of me, and it's just it's just a beautiful swan like dive, which I've never achieved in real life. So my hands are going to start to get pulled much faster than my feet, and that the difference between that can be quite radical, even in a short amount of distance.
Right Exactly, the strength of the tidal forces depends on the difference in the forces at your feet and at your head. So this only happens when the gravitational field is changing quickly. If it was the same ground vitate your feet in your head, then you wouldn't feel anything. And so that's why this happens only very close to very massive objects where the gravitational fields dependence on the distance is changing very strongly. For example, this does happen on the surface of the Earth. If you stand on the Earth, then the earth is pulling on your feet harder than it's pulling on your head, and so it is literally trying to decapitate you. But the difference in those forces is very, very small.
No, I couldn't trust Earth.
I never heard about that conspiracy theory the Earth is trying to decapitate us. But I bet if I type that into Google, there's some group of folks out there promulgating that conspiracy theory, right, and now they're going to find out they were right the whole time. The Earth is trying to decapitate you. But of course your neck is strong enough to overcome that. Because the tidal forces here on Earth are not that strong. The difference in gravity from being like the radis of the Earth or the rais of the Earth plus two meters is very small. Whereas if you get close to a black hole, and this is why black holes are more dangerous, because all their mass is concentrated and is one dense spot, so you can get close to them, then the difference in the forces between your feet and your head become much much larger. You know, you can't do that with the Earth because if you dug a hole into the Earth and try to get close to the center, then you'd be actually losing gravitational power. The force of gravity gets smaller as you get closer to the center. Of the Earth, because so much of the Earth is now further out than you are where a black hole it's all concentrated in that one center spot. So as you get closer, it gets more intense, the curvature gets higher, and the tidal forces tear you apart. So that's definitely something to worry about when we're.
Talking about like the compact object in the center of a black hole, Like how big is it? Are there different sizes of these compact objects, and like how dense is it? Like if you wanted to pick up the center of a black hole, like how heavy would that be?
Wow?
What did you just like casually toss out one of the deepest questions in phys We just really don't know. You know, we can calculate the size of the event horizon based on the gravitational constant and the mass of something. We could figure out the radio city event horizon, the point of no return, But we don't know what's inside the black hole. We don't know is there a singularity the center where all of the mass is concentrated into a zero volume point even though that makes absolutely no sense, or has quantum mechanics interfered in some way, and fuzzed that out a little bit, so we got like a little bit of a fuzzy singularity, or is it something totally different we haven't imagined. The problem is that we don't have a theory of quantum gravity, so we just really don't know what's going on inside.
The black hole. I bet it's that baseball I threw out of my yard and my parents said, got stuck in the neighbor's yard. But I'm pretty sure it made it to space.
That and all the unpaired socks I have. The other one is definitely in a black.
Hole somewhere exactly. Yes.
But this is the other problem about being inside the black hole. Say you somehow survive spaghetification and get inside a black hole, then you might wonder, like, how could life evolve or survive inside the black hole? Because won't it just fall towards the center? And it's true that in most black holes every path leads towards the singularity at the center. That is, if you assume what general relativity is telling us that there is a singularity. So let's just put sort of quantum mechanics on pause and consider only the general relativistic view of what's inside a black hole, this infinitely dense dot at the center. In normal black holes, then space is pointed towards there. The gravitational force is so strong that everything will just end up being squished into the singularity. And we don't think that life can survive in the singularity. So that's definitely a problem that life inside black holes would have to overcome.
Right, So, if you're like a spaghetti alien, you're like, hey, I'm fine being spaghetti. But then once you get towards the center, you're no longer spaghetti. You're like the world's tiniest yochi or the most compact nyoki. I guess we don't know the size of the center of the black hole, but you get turned into like the most dense ball of yoki you've ever had, which I'm not a big fan of dense yoki.
So what's the smallest piece of pasta you can name, Katie? Is it orzo? Can you go smaller than orzo?
Orzo? Yeah, that would probably be it.
There must be like an orzini or something, right, like a mini or zoo.
That's what causes black holes. Thanks Italy.
All right, well, Italian listeners out there, tell us what the smallest piece of pasta with an official name is please write to us and educate us.
And while you're thinking about that, why don't we take a quick break, and then when we get back, we're gonna talk about how maybe maybe we could survive being little pasta inside of a black hole.
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And we are back. And we got the bad news first, which is that it seems pretty gnarly inside of a black hole. If we aren't turned into spaghetti first, then we're turned into the most densely compact orzo in the universe. Obviously, probably a human couldn't do this, but could anything avoid this very I guess pasta oriented demise.
Well, it turns out you just have to be a little bit picky about the kind of black hole that you choose to base your civilization in.
Location. Location, location, Yes.
Absolutely, and size turns out size is key, just like in every real estate market. So the first question is the one about title forces. Right, could you live inside a black hole or even enter a black hole or come near a black hole without getting shredded by the tidal forces? So remember that the strength of the tidal forces depends on how close you are to the center of the black hole. As you get close to the center, the gravitational field starts to grow very quickly. And it's that difference in the strength of the gravitational field from your head to your feet that kills you. So what you want to do is be far away from the center of the black hole, all right, So how do you enter a black hole but be far away from its center? The key is to make the black hole super duper massive, because the size of the black hole actually grows pretty quickly with mass. It's actually linear. So if you get, for example, a super massive black hole, one that has like fat thousands or millions of times the mass of the Sun. Then it's so big that the edge of the event horizon is really really far from the center of the black hole, and the tidal forces will actually not tear you apart. You could enter the black hole without being torn to pieces, So.
You actually want, even though it sounds more dangerous, the bigger black holes are less deadly than the smaller ones.
Yes, the bigger black holes are less deadly as long as you stay near the outskirts right at their core, near their singularity. They're much more powerful. Of course, they're much more dangerous because they have much more mass. But you can slip over the edge of a big black hole without being subject to these tidal forces that could tear you to pieces. I actually sat down and did this calculation because I didn't believe it at first, But it's true. If you assume that the human body can survive a certain amount of force before it's like torn to pieces.
That's a big assumption.
I also, you know that everybody can survive the same title forces, even though I'm sure like the rock, you know you could toss them and do any sized black hole and you come out smiling. You know this has just to do with, like, you know, the strength of the human body. Actually, Katie, let me ask you, as a biologist, which part of the body do you think is like most essential for holding us together. We're talking about like muscle strength, or like our bones, or what is it that's keeping our heads on top of our necks.
Anyway, it's kind of hard to separate everything out right, because when you start to lose cohesion with any kind of part of your system, it will cause total castrophic failure. So even if your skeleton is sticking together, but your muscles become detached from your skeleton and your organs inside your guts start to slosh around and turn into sort of putting, and I don't actually it's like I know sort of what happens if you stick a human body down into highly dense psis. So like if you go to the bottom of the ocean, you actually have a catastrophic failure of the body because of how it forces your organs to basically become a an organ salad inside of your abdominal cavity. And so even though your body doesn't necessarily tear apart when you go down, like you may not like see on the outside that the body is being destroyed on the inside. You're having some troubles.
Organ salad is the kind of thing you see on a menu and never order.
So I feel like in sort of an opposite situation because that's when you're getting condensed, right, So in the spaghettification process, you're getting stretched out. So I guess you know, the body could potentially not be torn apart, at least on the outside, but on the inside, if your organs are sort of getting spaghettified too much, you might still not survive.
So you're saying that my calculation might be optimistic that even if you don't get torn in pieces, it might not be good for your long term health. The insurance companies would probably reject you if they know that you've been inside a black hole.
Yeah, let's say we're a helmet on all of your.
Organs, the whole body helmet. Yeah, an organ helmet. All your kidney needs its own little helmet, and your liver need its own little helmet. But that's the lesson that we could imagine things surviving inside a black hole and not being torn to pieces as long as they have enough strength. It doesn't actually require ridiculous superhuman strength in order to stay cohesive and stay in one piece. So we can't imagine that kind of scenario even if we're not talking about humans, right, I wouldn't recommend sending any humans in well, just.
As I said, like, a human body can't survive the ocean floor, but there are plenty of animals that can, and they've actually specifically adapted to surviving the deep ocean, like fish who have replaced all of the air in their body with liquid. So like fish normally have a swim ladder that's full of air, and instead these deep seafish have swim bladders that are full of an oily substance, so that they don't, you know, have their organs crushed by the depths of the ocean.
So that they are less compressible.
Is that the idea, Yes, because liquids are less compressible than air, and so similarly, when whales dive deep, they actually allow all the air to be expelled from their lungs, which are compressible, so that their lungs actually do survive being collapsed and reopened. And so if they tried to hold the air in their lungs when they're diving, rather than allowing the lungs to collapse. It would crush their lungs and it would also cause problems upon resurfacing with the bins. So like, there are these adaptations we see in like the crushing depths of the ocean that allows animals to survive. And so I could imagine that there are definitely evolutionary traits that alien life of some kind could have to survive being spaghettified or stretched out.
Yeah, and we can imagine even simpler scenarios where you evolve on like a super Earth or mini Neptune, some planet with a much stronger gravitational pull. You just have to have a tougher body to live in that environment. So I think it's certainly in the realm of possible, in the realm of the imaginable, to have aliens that could survive, that have the tensile strength to survive the tidal forces inside at least close to the edge, but inside a really massive black hole.
Right.
And sometimes toughness doesn't necessarily mean hard and rigid, but soft and flexible so that it can be squished and stretched and still survive.
M like slinky life.
Right, like slinky life or gumby alien that sounds good.
But then, of course the other question is how do you stay near the edge. If you enter a black hole and you can only survive the tidle forces far away from the central singularity, then you need to avoid falling into the central singularity. And of course our impression is that once you enter a black hole, your fate is sealed. You will fall towards the center no matter what. Everything you do just hastens your demise.
So enjoy it while it last.
Yeah, so you know, get on, enjoy the ride. But you know, it turns out that there are other kinds of black holes. So this is another case of like, pick your black hole carefully, because the kind that we typically talk about is the simplest form of a black hole, a black hole that isn't spinning and doesn't have any electric charge. Now you might also know that there are only three things that you can know about a black hole from the outside. You can know its mass because you can feel the strength of its gravity even without going inside. You can know its electric charge because again you can feel like whether it has an electromagnetic field, and you could also know whether it's spinning. Those are the three characteristics of a black hole. Everything else about a black hole is totally cloaked from you. You can't tell if a black hole was made out of sandwiches or apples or lava or demised stars. You can't know anything about the configuration of the stuff inside the black hole.
All right, So we've got spinning black holes, electrified black holes. This doesn't seem like this would help with life.
Well, let's first talk about the spinning one we actually did to show recently about frame dragging. There's a really important concept in general relativity which I don't think gets enough attention, which is that the spin of an object changes its gravitational field. This is sort of weird and unusual because according to Newton, it shouldn't like, if you are in orbit around the Earth, you are feeling the earth gravitational pull. That just depends on the mass of the Earth and the fact that it's a sphere. Whether the Earth is spinning doesn't change its gravitational pull, according to Newton, because that doesn't change the actual configuration of where stuff is on the Earth. If the Earth is a perfect sphere and you spun it halfway around, it still looks like a perfect sphere. You get the same gravity. So Isaac Newton says that the gravity of something doesn't depend at all on its spin. But we all know by now Newton was wrong. I mean, he was mostly right, but basically he was wrong.
You got the fundamental get Newton, I'll say it.
Suck it Newton, or go have a fake Newton.
Newton.
And one of the really interesting consequences of general relativity is that a spinning object has a different gravitational field than an object that's not spinning. There's a few different effects, frame dragging and this geodetic effect, but you can tell whether an object is spinning because it changes its gravitational pull.
If you're spinning faster, do you have more gravity?
It depends exactly what you mean by spinning faster. If you take some of the gravitational energy and you convert it to spin, then you actually have less gravitational energy. And that's actually one way you might be able to take a part a black hole. If you took some of the energy of the black hole and you turned it into spin, then it reduces the gravitational energy of the black hole. And that's this idea of like peeling away the event horizon and revealing the naked singularity within, which would be pretty.
Awesome, the ultimate yo yo trick.
That would be super cool. I want to see a singularity in real life. Oh my gosh, I want to know what that looks like. But the other idea is to take a black hole that or exists and give it some spin, you know, you like, drop stuff in it that has some angular momentum, and then it adds to the spin of the black hole, and that actually really will change the gravitational field of the black hole, so that now not every path necessarily leads towards the center of the black hole. That's because the gravitational field doesn't just get stronger when you add angular momentum, it actually adds a spin to the object. Like they did this crazy experiment, this gravity Probe B where they have a gyroscope orbiting the Earth and they saw that because the Earth is spinning, it gives a little twist to those gyroscopes. So you can measure this like gravitational twist that happens when an object is spinning, and that will change the object's trajectory.
So instead of going straight towards your doom at the singularity of a black hole, like you'd be twirling towards.
You'd be twirling towards your doom as you eat cheese whiz. But also it turns out that if the black hole is spinning, then the shape of the gravitational potential is quite different, and there are stable orbits. There are ways that you can exist inside a black hole and just repeat your path and never fall towards the event horizon.
WHOA, you mean never as an infinite amount of time or just over large amounts of time, because I would think there'd be some change over a long enough period of time.
Right, Yeah, nobody can guarantee anything for infinity, but in a simple model where you don't like bump into anything else or lose any of your speed, then yeah, this orbit can be stable, the same way the Earth's orbit is in principle stable, though in practice it's you know, slowly losing velocity as it bumps into rocks or passes through clouds of gas or whatever. So the Earth eventually could fall into the Sun, So you can't say that it's like infinitely stable, but definitely on like cosmological time scales, it's stable. So here we're talking about a calculation somebody did assuming that this particle doesn't lose any more energy. There is a path, actually, there are several paths inside a black hole that never intersect the singularity.
That's so interesting. So you could just be a little spaghetti alien sort of peacefully orbiting certain death.
Yeah, but these are not like simple orbits. It's not like the Earth going around the Sun where it moves in a circle. These paths are kind of crazy, like they go closer to the singularity and they zoom back out and you're further out. Some of them are like figure eights, and some of them have like really weird, crazy flower patterns. So this would be quite a crazy environment for life to survive in, and it wouldn't be like a very simple scenario.
So you'd have to be sort of an improvisational spaghetti up for anything you have to yes, and these are orbits.
You've got to be able to stick to any wall you get thrown against. So that's one variety of black holes, these spinning black holes. The other thing you can do to black holes you can give it electric charge. You know, electric charge is conserved in this universe. So for example, if you drop a bunch of electrons into a black hole, that was otherwise neutral, then it becomes charged. Right, that charge can't just disappear, and you can measure the charge from the outside. But also that charge changes again the shape of the potential you feel when you're inside. Like, if you have a positive charge and the singularity is a positive charge, there's going to be some repulsive force there, so the total potential is going to be different than if it was just as a gravitational singularity. And again people have found stable orbits inside charged, non spinning black holes that potentially could last forever.
Oh wow. So basically if I put a bunch of like magnets on myself, electrified magnets, I could survive a black hole. Is that what you say?
You actually got electrified the black hole itself first, right, That's key. You got to get that thing spinning and get it charged up. So the lesson is that like a totally vanilla black hole with no spin and no charge, unsurvivable. You fall into that thing, you're getting sucked towards the center. Eventually there's no hope for you, just like people. But if you get a more interesting variety of black hole, one with charge or with spin or maybe even with both, than there are stable orbits. There are paths you could be on forever without ever falling into the singularity.
All right, well, I'm convinced, I think I can do it. I'm putting on my Space boots. But before I hop into this black hole after super charging it, why don't we take a quick break and I'll see if you have anything to say that could stop me from jumping in a black hole. Probably not.
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All right, and we are back. And we just talked about a couple of mitigating factors that could help something survive a black hole. Maybe not a human. Never say never when it comes to black holes. So if we have a spinning black hole where we get a little bit of a twisty twirl emotion so that we maybe can orbit the singularity rather than become one with the singularity, or a charge to the black hole where it's actually repelling you sort of like magnets, you know, like away from it, so that you aren't immediately in. Maybe you could have some kind of, you know, friendly relationship with this black hole. So does that mean that we're going to look inside a black hole for the first time and see a bunch of grinning little spaghetti aliens?
Perhaps, right. I don't think it means that anybody should jump into a black hole, because I think if you've evolved for life on a normal planet or anywhere else in the universe, you'll find the environment inside a black hole to be very unfriendly.
You're just saying that for legal reasons, aren't you.
That's true.
Nobody tries it.
My lawyer is standing behind me, WHI was bringing in my ear. We're really exposed here, Daniel. No, we don't want to encounter the naked singularity of legal problems. So don't jump into a black hole, or if you do, you know, take a camera with you and let me know what happens. But I wouldn't recommend it, and I'm not imagining that life could transition into a black hole. But I'm wondering if it's possible for life to be created, for life to begin and survive inside a black hole where it is adapted. Right to let that process of evolution find a solution to life inside a black hole?
Yeah, because if you are a life form that starts in a certain environment, you're much more likely to be able to evolve characteristics that helps you continue to live in that environment.
Yeah. So let's imagine, for example, not just we have like some poor human with bagnets taped to their chest tossed into a black hole, but imagine, for example, like a planet. You could have a large mass on the very edge of a super massive black hole, strong enough to not be torn apart by its tidal forces, and in some sort of stable orbit. A big planet like that might have the resources, the organic precursors to life necessary for things to get started.
So we're orbiting our Sun and we look outside and it's a nice sunny day, but there could be a planet orbiting the Singularity inside of a black hole. And they look outside and see what just a bunch of crazy mass you're going.
They see a bunch of spaghetti, right, spaces just filled with spaghetti for them. Now, what do you see if you're inside a black hole? It's cool. You can actually see things. You can actually see the entire universe if you're inside a black hole, because light can still enter the black hole and can still reach you. Right if you are not falling towards the singularity, then light from the outside universe can come into the black hole and can reach you. So you can still see stars and galaxies. You can do astronomy and all of that stuff, so you can still see the universe. Now, most of the sky is black. Most of the sky is sort of in the direction of the singularity, and from that direction you get no light. So the sky would be totally black except for a tiny little circle through which you could see out every direction from the black hole. You can even see like out the other side of the black hole, because light would bend all the way around the black hole and into this little effective tube and come to you. So you'd have like a little periscope into the rest of the universe.
Wow, I knew, I felt like I was being watched all the time, those dang aliens inside the black hole.
But that wouldn't be enough to support life, right, Like starlight probably doesn't have enough energy to kickstart life. But I mean, you tell me, doesn't life? I think, at least as we know, it requires some form of energy.
Yeah, I mean, I would think, even if we get creative about what life is, anything would require some kind of energy to maintain a stable enough pattern to be life. Right, So I would think it would need some kind of energy and not just this little tiny pinhole into the light of the universe.
Right.
And I know that we said we were going to try to think about crazy ways life could be, and you know, listeners out there feel free to be creative, but it's hard to imagine life in any way that isn't like violating entropy locally. You know, that isn't locally decreasing its entropy, and so that costs energy, and so there has to be some energy budget. Otherwise we're just blowing up the whole definition of life, which you know I'm happy to do, but I don't have any great ideas for how that would work. So now we need to figure out like how does the black hole planet have a source of energy if all we're getting is a pinprick of light from distant stars. Well, of course a black hole is a very powerful source of energy. And we talked about the tidal forces at play that's going to be trying to tear apart this planet. That actually is a positive because these tidal forces are tugging on this planet causing internal friction which turns into heat. For example, lots of the moons around Jupiter are hot on the inside because Jupiter is tugging on them. And for example Io and these other planets that might have like subsurface life or subsurface oceans, those are kept warm just by Jupiter's gravity, just by those same tidal forces that we were talking about needing to survive, they might actually be critical for survival.
So you could have a hot core in this black hole planet because it's getting tugged on by the singularity.
Yeah, you could have even no atmosphere necessarily, you could have everything be underground. You could have a hot core and there could definitely be a source of energy there. And I guess you could have like life form underground, or maybe there'd be a thin atmosphere or forms on the surface. But there's definitely a source of accessible energy in a planet near any massive object, because those tidle forces will keep it hot on the inside. And you know, the Earth, for example, is also subject to tidal forces. The Moon is squeezing the Earth with its tile forces. They're weak enough that they don't really distort the shape of the Earth very much. Of course, they only affect the oceans.
Yeah, stay in your lane, Moon, and the.
Sun has tidal forces on the Earth, but we're far enough away that those tidle forces are not very strong and the Earth is tough enough to survive the Sun's squeezing. But for a small object close to a really massive object, these tile forces are totally significant. They're very important, and so that could be a real source of energy for this weird kind of life we're talking about.
Yeah, that is really interesting. I mean, like the idea that you can squeeze something so hard like it causes heat. Like I know, there's like the type of welding I think when they just like press something really hard against something else and that pressure is so high that it actually causes the metal to melt, which is really interesting.
Yeah, or take like a cold piece of dough out of the fridge and massage it and neat it and it warms up. Right, You are working energy into it. You're creating internal friction and that heats it up.
It always comes back to spaghetti, doesn't it.
It's all about food when you record your podcast at lunchtime. So I think what that means is, assuming general relativity is correct about what's going on inside a black hole, that you can get to the inside of the black hole without being pulled apart by the tidal forces. If the black hole is large enough, you can get a stable orbit inside the black hole, if the black hole singularity is spinning or charged, and you can use the gravitational energy of that singularity to heat your planet. So what do you think, Katie, Do you think life could evolve on a planet like that?
I really think it could. I mean, we know that on Earth we have these very niche life forms, and in fact, the start of life itself seems to have occurred in a very potentially hostile environment. Even though we had all of the chemical reagents to form life, there was so much chaos in the Earth's oceans that it is a mystery how can organize life exist, you know, spontaneously, like what you were saying, like you need to somehow fight entropy a little bit in order to, as we know it, have some form of life. But because it did happen on Earth, I could imagine on a planet at least if you have some kind of energy source that yeah, I mean some form of life, even non carbon based life, even life that we don't really think of typically, could certainly form and start a podcast and ask the question, could life evolve on a planet not in our wonderful black hole.
Out there, in that weird little pin hole of the universe.
How could they all fit in there?
Well, you know, that's a really interesting point because as they're looking out in the universe, they're going to see the universe looking really, really old. Because another effect that happens when you go near a really heavy object is time dilation. If you're closed to a massive object, like the center of a black hole, then time moves slowly for you because there's this gravitational time dilation. This is different from how time goes slow when you're moving really really fast. That's relative velocity time dilation. This is just due to the curvature of space where in space is really curved. Time moves slow, so if you toss something into a black hole, you'll see its clocks running really slowly, and you will see your clocks running really really fast because you will have less curvature than it. So if you toss something into a black hole, then you'll see it sort of like freeze and go really slow. And if you jump into a black hole, you'll look out into the rest of the universe and you'll see the rest of the universe going really fast. So another question is like, has there been enough time on this time slowed down, almost frozen world for life to evolve. It might be that life can evolve on these black hole planets. It just hasn't yet because the universe is too young and time is almost frozen inside these black holes.
But to them, we would just be really old, and so they'd be listening to this podcast and it would be old news far after, long after we've died or been turned into robots.
Yeah, exactly, and so they will already know the answer to this question. So I wish they could shoot it back to us and just put us out of our misery.
But that is interesting because of these time differences, right, I mean even in terms of like having two planets that are so far apart from each other, let alone a planet that's inside of a black hole where time has slowed down. We may never necessarily cross paths, and it might be hard to sort of high five each other different life forms at a perfect point in time where we both exist at the same time, But that doesn't mean that they won't or didn't or couldn't exist.
I know, but that would be still and satisfying to know that life does exist out there but we could never see it. I mean inside a black hole, outside a black hole. The outcome that terrifies me the most is that there is life out there, but we never know about it because it's so distant or distant in time, or we just you know, unlucky about where we are in the universe. To me, I want to know the answer to this question, and I like to believe that some humans someday will know the answer. And so for the answer to be out there, to exist in reality, but for humans to never know it, oh, I just can't even take that idea.
Well, maybe some life form will invent a podcast that transcends space time and then we do find out about each other, and then it all just descends into silly podcasts about movies and animals and stuff.
The answer to every problem is a podcast. Why did the dog poop on the floor? I don't know. Maybe you should listen to our podcasts all right, So thank you very much for taking this crazy journey with us into the black hole to imagine what life might be like, how life may have even evolved and exist right now inside a black hole listening to this billions of years old podcast episode imagining what it's life is like.
Hi, future spaghetti aliens inside of a black hole. Hang ten, as we say, because we have ten digits. I'm sure you have like billions of digits, but you know.
So think about those spaghetti aliens. Chew on that for a while. Go have a tasty lunch, and thank you very much for joining us on today's episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
Great to be here, Thanks for having me.
All right, tune in next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or.
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