In the same vein, what about a stellar-sized black hole like Cygnus X-1? At this size the rate of evaporation is quicker, right?
In the same vein, what about a stellar-sized black hole like Cygnus X-1? At this size the rate of evaporation is quicker, right?
It seems like a ridiculously huge amount of time for such a small amount, more so considering that according to theory these black holes will eventually evaporate completely.
But then I try and visualize just how much it actually takes to go from 10^99 to hit the 10^100 (googol) milestone, and it’s just too big a numerical chasm to truly wrap one’s mind around. It all reaches the level of bizarre abstractions way, way, waaaay before that point.
Something I like to think about is when we die, assuming there’s no afterlife, then you don’t feel the passage of time. A second or trillion of years is the same. If there’s ever a point in that future where you’d gain consciousness again somehow, then you’d feel as if you’d be there the second after you died. It doesn’t really relate to black holes but I felt like sharing the thought anyway.
The boltzmann brain hypothesis. Given enough time, a spontaneous brain, identical to yours, will form. It will experience for a short period before dying (nothing says it needs to be on a planet, or even in a body).
The weirdness of true infinities.
Wouldn’t that be considered afterlife too?
Well if time is infinite, isn’t it only a matter of time until your brain is somehow reassembled
That evaporation rate is so small that you can think of black holes as eternal. However, it’s still not zero, so in extremely long time scales, it begins to make a deference. That’s when the heat death of the universe comes in, but those time scales are just ridiculous.
What’s screwy is that black holes are only an issue for physics if they are eternal. As matter falls towards the event horizon, time, as measured from outside, goes ever slower. It takes an infinitely lon time to cross the event horizon. Hawking radiation means that it will never actually cross, since the black hole will retreat in a finite time. If you flew towards one, you would apparently skim it, without entering. You would emerge to find the universe long dead and gone however .
It turns black holes from problematic infinity points to really weird knots in spacetime.