Astronomers estimate that there are as many
as 100 million black holes in our galaxy alone,
and that there is a supermassive black hole
at the center of almost every galaxy.
Black holes are still quite mysterious, we
don’t know a lot about them.
Works of science fiction allow us to imagine
that black holes could serve as gateways to
other worlds.
As far as we currently know, going inside
a black hole is not the smartest idea unless
you want to turn into human spaghetti.
But According to professor Stephen Hawking,
black holes could be wormholes, that could
provide short cuts for interstellar space
travel, which otherwise would be pretty slow
and tedious.
A wormhole, aka an Einstein rosen bridge,
is essentially a shortcut through space time.
So lets expand on this idea in today’s episode
of life’s biggest questions and ask.
What if humans could travel through black
holes?
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I’m charlotte dobre.
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The idea of black holes has actually been
around for a couple of hundred years, John
Mitchell of Cambridge wrote about something
he called dark stars back in 1783, now known
as black holes.
Most scientists believe in the idea of the
singularity, where a huge amount of matter
is shoved into a tiny space, making a black
hole.
The gravity of a black hole is so intense,
it is impossible to escape, even for light.
The edge of black hole is called the event
horizon.
It’s the point of no return.
Imagine the edge of a black hole as being
a waterfall.
Once you go over the edge, you can’t climb
out, unless you happened to be capable of
travelling faster than the speed of light.
As you get closer to the back hole, the speed
needed to escape goes up, and at a certain
point, the escape velocity needed is faster
than the speed of light.
The escape velocity needed to leave earth’s
surface is about 25 thousand miles per hour.
Considering that time only goes forwards,
and never backwards, once you went through
a black hole you would be annihilated.
There is however a way around this.
We know that gravity bends space, but black
holes are not ordinary objects.
If black holes were able to rotate, like other
objects in space, then they could theoretically
turn into a ring if it rotated fast enough.
A ring singularity could provide a gateway
to other universes, other time periods.
This is what’s known as a wormhole.
The term wormhole was coined by physicist
john wheeler in the 1960s, when he was examining
the work of Einstein and Rosen.
An Einstein-Rosen bridge is a tunnel through
the universe that is essentially like a short
cut between two points in space.
No one really knows what happens to all the
matter and light that enters a black hole.
So where does it go?
Is it lost?
Or does it come out the other side?
In a speech from 2015, Stephen hawking said,
‘black holes are not the eternal prisons
they were once thought.
The way out wouldn’t take people back to
where they came from, but instead they would
reappear, but somewhere else.
Perhaps in our advanced future, once we have
used up all the resources on planet earth,
whatever remains of humanity will have to
use wormholes to find other areas of the universe
to inhabit.
And maybe a wormhole could give us access
to an alternate universe, with other habitable
planets.
These habitable planets could be barren or
already taken over by another intelligent
civilization, maybe far more advanced than
our own.
Maybe this would mean that we would be forced
to live alongside an alien civilization, or
an interstellar war would begin.
Let’s hope this advanced alien civilization
could share their knowledge of the universe
with us, and together we could colonize the
cosmos.
Unlimited destinations for space travel would
be at our disposal.
We could also possibly use wormholes as time
machines.
We could theoretically alter the future by
changing the past.
Maybe we could go back in time and find out
who shot JFK.
Maybe we could try to stop Hitler.
But changing the past could have dire consequences.
One could literally erase our entire existence
if they weren’t careful.
The ripple effect of changing one small thing
from the past is incomprehensible.
That being said, Stephen hawking said that
if we could travel through black holes, we
wouldn’t be able to come back to our universe.
Once you entered a black hole, thats it.
You’re on the other side.
And according to new research by postdoctoral
fellow peter hintz, whoever travelled through
a black hole would leave their past behind,
and before them there would be an infinite
number of possible futures.
Yes, entering a black hole could take you
to an alternate universe, but it would also
delete your past and skew reality as we know
it.
Now as we come back to reality, I will say
that no one has really figured out the math
of a wormhole to make it so that the gateway
remains stable.
Furthermore, no one knows how a wormhole could
come into existence.
At this time, its most commonly believed that
if you entered a black hole, your mass is
simply added to the black hole, you don’t
go anywhere.
You would become stretched out into individual
atoms by epically strong tidal forces.
As you fall closer to the event horizon, eventually
all you will see is blackness before you are
dragged at the speed of light and stretched
out into strings of atoms.
This is what’s known as spaghettification.
Definitely one of the worst ways to die, and
we don’t recommend it.
That being said, no one knows what happens
beyond the event horizon of a black hole,
scientists currently don’t know what happens
when you exit the universe.
We are nowhere near close to any black holes,
let alone able to see what happens when we
enter one.
All we can do is rely on Einstein’s theory
of relativity to work out what might happen.
Tell us, what do you think would happen if
humans could travel through black hoes?
For now, I’m charlotte dobre and you’ve
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