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- Hacker News
- No no no ... they're Monoliths from 2001: A Space Odessy, remember when he became one and would go from star to star blowing them up for fun?by gigatexal
- And yet no one does a thing about it.by aklemm
- What would you like done?by CookieCrisp
- Be the change you want to see in the world. Go out there and start swatting away nanoscopic black holes.
- Sounds like PMH, if they exist, are essentially the Universe’s ultimate cannonball.by mmmBacon
- Kind of chilling to think about these tiny black holes. If they have enough gravitational pull to destabilize a white dwarf, I don't want to know what they'd do to our solar system.
- PBH (if they exist) are microscopic in size. If they're real and qualify as a potential dark matter candidate they have passed our solar system many times with the only thing happening being undetectable gravitational tugs.
- These supernova-generating black holes are atomic scale (Schwartzchild radius of 15pm to 15nm), yet they carry the momentum of a large asteroid. If one of these hit the earth, they would cause a life-ending apocalypse like the event that ended the dinosaurs. The fact that this has not happened yet is encouraging.by ttul
- This is one of those headlines where I simultaneously think "cool" and now have a new source of low-grade background anxiety about. It can have a seat next to false vacuum collapse.by empath75
- The good news about black holes is that even if one transited the solar system, it would be extremely unlikely to come anywhere near earth.by trollbridge
- Concern for celestial events is a bit like one of your gut bacterium being concerned with your work scheduleby alansaber
- In that case you may enjoy “The Blue Afternoon that Lasted Forever” by Daniel Wilson.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260310115201/https://www.willi...
- Take comfort in the fact that compared to the size of the universe, the speed of light is like molasses in January. Cosmological eschatology is a very slow game, and the odds of you being alive and in the right place to be a spectator are literally astronomically small.by Zigurd
- Wouldn't Type Ia supernovas caused by blackholes have a different brightness? That could mean the entire cosmic ladder needs to be revised, maybe this could resolve the crisis in cosmology..by boesboes
- The "Great Filter" answer to the Fermi Paradox.
- It seems like it would be the most efficient implementation of the Great Filter, since it would just look like a natural occurrence to any observers.
- I didn't understand how a black hole could pass through a star when I read this. I think of black holes as large. Apparently a primordial black hole can have the mass of an asteroid compressed into a space smaller than a proton. I also thought very small black holes evaporated quickly via Hawking radiation. I was wrong on the scale there too. A PBH with the mass of an asteroid can easily live for longer than the universe has been around. Something about the very very early universe let matter collapse into these things without the normal processes that form stellar sized black holes.by iandanforth
- The very early universe was quite dense, compared to today. Getting enough stuff in the same place to form an event horizon was relatively easier.by idiotsecant
- If I remember correctly, Stephen Hawking had to do some serious math in the 1970s to convince himself a tiny black hole was not hiding in our Sun
I think there's a PBS Space Time on it (of course)
adding: yup! love that show
by ck2 - Anyone have guesses about how a transiting primordial black hole would effect a Sun like star? Paper is about tidal forces inducing supernova in white dwarfs. For that matter how might it effect sea tides?by cousinbryce
- Picturing the crust of the earth being pulled off like an orange peel. But maybe seen too much scifi so it's probably a lot more boring :/by temp0826
- We have constraints that primordial black holes must be less than the size of a large asteroid. They would be gravitationally insignificant to the Earth unless they actually passed through it.
I also don't think it would really be detectable in the Sun. Perhaps there would be some transient astroseismology signature.
by antognini - For the latter, you mught enjoy Greg Egan's "Perihelion Summer".by pavel_lishin
- Most likely minimal? The mass is low.
I am, however, reminded that the orbit of the asteroid Juno (~250km diameter) permanently changed in 1839 without an obvious cause.
- 3-Body-Problem once again vindicated as the scariest possible explanation for the Fermi Paradoxby Schlagbohrer
- In what way? This is discussing, as far as anyone knows, an entirely natural phenomenon.by andrewflnr
- suspecting that star explosions are caused by nefarious super-intelligences is just Greek mythology with more steps.by etangent
- Did you intend to say dark forest hypothesis?by criddell
- I think a fragile world hypothesis is more interesting and scary.
Instead of a superintelligence killing any emerging intelligence, superintelligence is so smart that it can perturb spacetime in ways that easily kill itself.
Kind of like the idea that LLMs will give anyone with a garage the ability to create killer viruses (wild claim), a superintelligence might trivially create black holes that engulf it. If the intelligence is distributed across many agents (or nations), someone will try something stupid that kills the entire population.
It'd be even scarier if they could accidentally collapse the supposed vacuum state. Universal annihilation at the speed of light just because you got too smart.
Fragile world / fragile universe meets "too smart for your own good".
by echelon - Many physicists have pointed out several flaws in the dark forest theory, which makes for a great read but doesn’t really carry over to the real universe 1:1.by 9dev