Maximizing Survival Time Inside the Event Horizon of a Black Hole
Written by Fraser Cain
Here's a scenario that will face many of us in the far future. You're hurtling through the cosmos at nearly the speed of light in your spaceship when you take a wrong turn and pass into the event horizon of a black hole. Uh oh, you're dead – not yet, but it's inevitable. Since nothing, not even light can escape the pull from a black hole once it passes into the event horizon, what can you do to maximize your existence before you join the singularity as a smear of particles?
Physicists used to think that black holes were sort of like quicksand in this situation. Once you cross the event horizon, or Schwarzschild radius, your date with the singularity is certain. It will occur at some point in the future, in a finite amount of proper time. The more you try to struggle, the faster your demise will come. It was thought that your best strategy was to do nothing at all and just freefall to your doom.
Fortunately, Geraint F. Lewis and Juliana Kwan from the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, have got some suggestions that fly in the face of this stuggle = quick death hypothesis. Their paper is called No Way Back: Maximizing survival time below the Schwarzschild event horizon, and it was recently accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
When an unlucky victim falls into the event horizon of a black hole, they will survive for a finite amount of time. If you fall straight down into a stellar black hole, you'll last a fraction of a second. For a supermassive black hole, you might last a few hours.
Due to the tremendous tidal forces, an unlucky victim will suffer spaghettification, where differences in gravity from your head to your feet stretch you out. But let's not worry about that for now. You're trying to maximize survival time.
Since you've got a spaceship capable of zipping around from star to star, you've got a powerful engine, capable of affecting your rate of descent. Point down towards the singularity and you'll fall faster, point away and you'll fall more slowly. Keep in mind that you're inside a black hole, flying a spaceship capable of traveling near the speed of light, so Einstein's theories of relativity come into play.
And it's how you use your acceleration that defines how much personal time you'll have left.
In a moment of panic, you may point your rocket outwards and fire it at full thrust, keeping the engine running until you arrive at the central singularity. However, Lewis and Kwan have demonstrated that in the convoluted space-time within the event horizon, such a strategy actually hastens your demise, and you'll actually end up experiencing less time overall. So, what are you to do? Lewis and Kwan have the solution, identifying an acceleration "sweet-spot" that gives you the maximal survival time. All you have to do, once across the event horizon, is fire your rocket for a fixed amount of time, and then turn it off and enjoy the rest of the fall.
But how long should you fire your rocket for? Lewis and Kwan show this is a simple calculation involving the mass of the black hole, how powerful your rocket is, and how fast you crossed the event horizon, easily doable on a desktop computer.
Here's another analogy from Lewis:
"Consider a race to the centre between a free faller and a rocketeer. Suppose they cross the event horizon together holding hands. As they cross, they start identical stop watches. One falls inwards, while the other accelerates towards the centre for a little, then swings their rocket round and decelerates such that the free faller and the rocketeer meet and clasp hands again just before hitting the singularity. A check on their stop watches would reveal that the free faller would experience the most personal time in the trip. This is related to one of the basic results of relativity – people in freefall experience the maximum proper time."
So now you know. Even after you've fallen into the black hole's event horizon, there are things you can do to lengthen your harrowing journey so that you get to experience more time.
Time to you can use to deal with your spaghettification problem.
Original Source: Arxiv research paper
Filed under: Black Holes
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December 27th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
[...] read more | digg story Tags: Space [...]
January 26th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
wow
February 11th, 2008 at 10:01 am
thats how i wanna go out!! thats fukin awesome!!! spagetify me!!!
May 5th, 2008 at 10:39 am
As the gravity field increases the rate of time would slow to a crawl and stop eventually. So as you were falling closer to the singularity, everyone outside would have aged and died long before you would. So, you would have the last laugh.
June 28th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Uh, the hell would you want to lengthen the time?
The correct course of action upon realizing you've hit an event horizon (assuming you'd ever notice) is to pull out that trusty revolver you've been keeping from under your seat, pray that it's functional, and say goodnight.
Yes all space captains should have revolvers for the marauding alien boarding parties and what not.
June 29th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
I can imagine situations where falling into a super-massive black hole would make sense. For instance, if the Big Rip hypothesis turns out to be valid, our descendants might want to turn the Local Group of galaxies into a really big rabbit hole. The Big Rip ends with all singularities being flattened; the only place to survive it might be to place yourself within one.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:56 am
What happens if I turn the (near-light-speed-capable) spaceship at rightangles to the singularity and attempt to orbit it using maximum (survivable) acceleration to achieve maximum speed? IF the black hole is big enough, don't I get time to accelerate to very-near light speed and extend my experienced time (potentially) indefinitely?
As the spaceship gets nearer to the singularity, centrifugal force will rise proportional to 1/R for a given velocity … unfortunately gravitational force will rise proportionately to 1/R2.
I assume that, in reality, the gamma rays would fry anybody in millisecs, so it makes little difference! Or, at near-light speed, would gamma rays appear to be nothing more than infra-red (still too hot)?
July 11th, 2008 at 11:21 am
So why not try to orbit the singularity?
July 25th, 2008 at 10:45 am
[...] Verdammt, wir Wissenschaftler schreiben Abhandlungen über die seltsamsten Dinge. [...]
July 27th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
wow… thats always my dream to get over the event horizon and see down at the pit. at least now i am prepared in how to get the most fun out of it. thanks
August 20th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
[...] humans to enter a new age of understanding their physical reality. So when the black hole comes, how can you survive longer. That's what I was wondering. Good luck in your event horizon. « No Limbo. Stiff [...]
August 20th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
[...] While checking my facts (I'm confident enough to give answers, but I'm not a qualified expert and I like to make sure I don't mislead people), I came across a fascinating idea – that it's possible to find a "sweet spot" of acceleration that maximises that finite time before you are destroyed. This study can be found in a paper from last year titled "No Way Back: Maximizing survival time below the Schwarzschild event horizon", written by two Australian physicists, Geraint F. Lewis and Juliana Kwan from the University of Sydney. A great summary of the article can be found in the Universe Today blog. [...]
September 5th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Sorry Alan H., but there is no such thing as traveling perpendicular to the radial direction inside the event horizon. One of the things Relativity tells us is that inside the event horizon, space becomes time-like, in the sense that there is only one direction one can travel (toward the singularity), just as, outside the event horizon, one can only travel in one direction in time (barring wormholes).
Furthermore, trying to use centrifugal force to your advantage becomes futile once inside the photon sphere (1.5 times the radius of the event horizon), because spacetime gets so warped there that the faster you orbit, the stronger the centrifugal force you'd feel pushing you TOWARDS the event horizon, not away as you'd expect in flat spacetime. (There was a nice article in Scientific American in the mid-90s that described this effect.)
September 10th, 2008 at 7:29 am
if i was capable of flying through space star to star i would imagine i would have an intergalactic UPS (universal positioning system) to guide me in my intergalactic missions.. and it would show me where black holes are..
September 10th, 2008 at 7:45 am
What about the black hole being a vacuum and lack of friction in the black hole? and wouldn't your rocket require friction to be propelled?
September 10th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Obvious…
September 10th, 2008 at 7:56 am
RejectCo: no, rockets work in a vacuum. Don't forget regular space is also a vacuum. Very simplistically, a rocket is an explosion in a box – the box experiences pressure on all its internal sides. If you remove one of the sides (the nozzle on the rocket) the forces are out of balance and it moves.
There's a recent episode of astronomycast that covers this.
September 10th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Erm …
"… analogy from Lewis:
Consider a race to the centre between a free faller and a rocketeer. Suppose they cross the event horizon together holding hands. As they cross, they start identical stop watches. One falls inwards, while the other accelerates towards the centre for a little, then swings their rocket round and decelerates such that the free faller and the rocketeer meet and clasp hands again just before hitting the singularity. A check on their stop watches would reveal that the free faller would experience the most personal time in the trip. This is related to one of the basic results of relativity – people in freefall experience the maximum proper time."
The latter is precisely the "stuggle = quick death hypothesis," since the one who didn't struggle (the freefaller) experienced more time than the one who struggled (the rocketeer)
This example contradicts the claim that "Geraint F. Lewis and Juliana Kwan from the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, have got some suggestions that fly in the face of this stuggle = quick death hypothesis"
September 10th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Simply calculate the essentially impossible odds of your escape, the infinite improbability drive will do the rest.
September 10th, 2008 at 10:34 am
This is the ultimate demise of any pastafarian.
September 10th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
These so-called "scientists" are just trying to hide the truth: that when you go into a black hole, you arrive in a dimension of "pure chaos, pure evil" where all sorts of nasty torture happens to you as well as cannibalism and so on.
Or so Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne tell me.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
thanks Mark
September 11th, 2008 at 7:30 am
What happen ?
Somebody set up us the hole.
We lose signal.
What !
Main screen turn on.
It's you !!
How are you gentlemen !!
All your space are belong to us.
You are on the way to destruction.
What you say !!
You have no chance to survive make your time.
Ha ha ha ha ….
September 11th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
ummm…I think people seem to be forgetting a very IMPORTANT aspect of any black hole–they are extremely hot! many of them are at one million kelvin (thats like 3million degrees!). You would not get closer than I would have to say a few million miles before you veritably disintegrate!
September 11th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
oh and by the way… all your bases are belong to us!
September 12th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
"As the gravity field increases the rate of time would slow to a crawl and stop eventually."
September 28th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
wow i hope im dead when this happens .
(hey i think that the black hole is a portal to another dimension u know people think but i belive, if you survive a black hole and live to tell the story then u will know the truth ,remember that a black hole can destory an entire planet EVEN THE SUN DUDE !! ) for what i know black holes are extra demesion portals.if it has energy and its faster than ligh and its hotter than the sun ,dude ur going to hell
Scientists are hiding this everyone knows if ur going to die straight from a black hole that means ur bad luck has reachen max level and ur goi9ng straight to hell
Portals dimensions universes everyone knows
(for what i think ,in pluto there is a big black hole near tha destroys everything )
if a black hole apears in the solar scystem there are some options that may happen .
1.Alien monster s creatures will apear and kill you
2.The black holes tremendous strength will rip even your blood
3.the sun may loose all its light but you will still die dude the sun is gravity that holds the entire galaxy so i suggest die before this even happens (the earth and all the planets in the gaalxy will fall down riping apart all its life)
4.Demons from hell attack you and the black holes turns into a portal throwing monster sat u blablabla
5.survivors may become ateam and destory all the aliens save the galaxy and thn u will become the biggest hero in all the universe
September 28th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
well i forgot something
6.scientist will unleash the most destructive and powerfull techonolgy ever discovered for man kind and use it against the black holes desteoying the black hole powers and saving the galaxy
September 28th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
black holes wont rip you off they only suck you in the energy is so powerfull there that it will turn you into dust only a monster from hell can go into that thing (dude a black hole is made of the most dangerous explosive and laser like rock to ever excists to even aliens >o< )
September 30th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Thanks for the chuckle Roxes!
November 3rd, 2008 at 8:49 am
i think it would be interesting to go through a black hole and see the other side that might be where the ufos are coming from when they visit us.i would like to be by the black hole where the time is frozen where i can go back to earth in 4084 and see the real future. i think at that year era we should have a spaceship to venture different stars.
November 8th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Just tell me one thing, why the hell would you want to lengthen your death time? I mean you're going to die anyways, so why not make it quick and snappy, not slow and spaghettifiedily (is that a word?) :L
November 10th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Actually, you won't die from spagettification. A recent science report showed that you'd actually roast to death inside a black hole first.
And I'd be a bit worried about all the other stuff floating around in the black hole between the event horizon and the singularity.
Oh, and lots of photons will be zipping around the inside edge of the event horizon, never quite able to escape, but ready to blind you. Bring some strong sunglasses.
November 13th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
YOU DO HAVE GUNS ON SPACESHIPS BECAUSE IF YOU FALL OFFCORSE INTO THE JUNGLE THEY HAVE PISTLES IN THERE SURVILE KIT TO FIND FOOD
November 13th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
You would roast in seconds if not faster before you can think of anything
November 26th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Maximizing survival time in black holes…classic and imaginative.
I agree that it seems kinda pointless to lengthen the time it takes you to die. I mean, you're already stuck inside the black hole in your pimped out ship, you are guaranteed to have a one-sided meeting with the singularity, so why spend more time floating in blackness, recording messages you can never send?
November 27th, 2008 at 9:28 am
qidto uvhm
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:33 pm
omks inwad zokq
December 24th, 2008 at 5:45 am
nsjrm
December 24th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
What do you say?
December 31st, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Hey, the quote you cite seems to argue the EXACT OPPOSITE (per Reg) of what you've written. Can you explain this?:
"A check on their stop watches would reveal that the free faller would experience the most personal time in the trip."
"Physicists used to think that black holes were sort of like quicksand in this situation…. Fortunately, Geraint F. Lewis and Juliana Kwan from the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, have got some suggestions that fly in the face of this stuggle = quick death hypothesis."
????? EXPLAIN!!!
January 31st, 2009 at 4:50 pm
If you really wanted to lengthen time, ensure that a politician is aboard, then ask him/her to make a speech. I guarantee it will feel like eternity.