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Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

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Re: Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

#71

Post by SoftTalker »

alansaber wrote: post #28
echelon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

Sounds logical to me. It's already remarkable that we haven't done this with fission weapons. It's not unreasonable to assume that within a century we'll have antimatter weapons. Destructive potential only goes up.

We could not come close to destroying the world with fission weapons. We might make things very hard for humanity, but the world and life would continue, perhaps even benefit.

Re: Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

#72

Post by pavel_lishin »

temp0826 wrote: post #59
cousinbryce wrote: post #5

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?

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 :/

I think at the energy scales we're talking about, everything involved would basically act like a fluid.

Re: Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

#73

Post by pavel_lishin »

graemep wrote: post #29
9dev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What flaws? Do they apply to variants such as Greg Bear's and related ideas such as berserkers?

Do Forge of God/Anvil of the Stars differ significantly from pretty bog-standard dark forest scenarios?

I don't remember any other of his books that might apply, but I haven't read all of them. (I probably should. What I have read was great.)

Re: Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

#74

Post by cyberax »

ttul wrote: post #36
choboswaggings wrote: post #26

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.

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.

Not really? They would likely pass through Earth completely invisibly.

Re: Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

#75

Post by graemep »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #73
graemep wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What flaws? Do they apply to variants such as Greg Bear's and related ideas such as berserkers?

Do Forge of God/Anvil of the Stars differ significantly from pretty bog-standard dark forest scenarios? I don't remember any other of his books that might apply, but I haven't read all of them. (I probably should. What I have read was great.)

its a few years since I read Liu Cixin's books and even longer since I read Greg Bear's, but the technology was very different, and it was not as uniformly hostile. The primary technology used to destroy civilisations in Bear's books was self-replicating machines, and there was an advanced civilisation that tries to defend or rescue those attacked, and punish the aggressors - so its a bit less bleak.

Re: Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

#76

Post by jfengel »

SoftTalker wrote: post #66
jandrewrogers wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn't low-mass primordial black holes have evaporated by now?

Depends on what "low mass" means. An earth-mass black hole lasts 10^50 years. A black hole the mass of Mount Everest lasts 10^21 years.

Black holes on the order of metric tons would have evaporated by now. But primordial black holes can come in any size, and there is a vast range of them that will exist much longer than the universe has already existed.

Re: Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

#77

Post by Vvector »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #24
9dev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you point me to more info on that or just tell me? I am curious about reasons to be more optimistic than that book lays out. I would much prefer the Carl Sagan view of the Cosmos as one where it simply makes no physical nor cultural sense at all to be aggressive toward other stellar civilizations.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-dark-forest-hypothesis-is-...

Re: Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

#78

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #72
temp0826 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :/

I think at the energy scales we're talking about, everything involved would basically act like a fluid.

This is correct, the Earth is effectively a ball of water, and would get blended/smeared/sheared like if you toss water across a yard out of a cup.

Re: Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

#79

Post by EA-3167 »

9dev wrote: post #17
Schlagbohrer wrote: post #10

3-Body-Problem once again vindicated as the scariest possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox

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.

There are loads of issues with it as hard sci-fi, but the bigger issue is that it's meant as a political allegory far more than it's meant to be hard sci-fi. Where I think it shines to some extent in the latter case is its ability to explore scale and build intuition about the vast scales involved in space.

Otherwise though? Sophons destroy the entire premise of the "Dark Forest"! Still as I said the series is far more concerned with overt allegories (West vs East, Collectivism vs Individualism, etc), and more covert allegories that allegedly criticize the CCP's way of doing things.

I don't read Mandarin, but I suspect the ability to do so and the high context nature of the language, helps a lot in getting that across.

Re: Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

#80

Post by strogonoff »

andrewflnr wrote: post #65
echelon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that the universe is consistent We don't know this either. We are very limited in detection. Our energies are small. How "standard" are standard candles and other references? Are the facts that stand as the basis for our theories even correct? We are too primitive to be dealing in absolutes.

> > the fact that the universe is consistent > We don't know this either. See this is what I'm talking about as far as being too open-minded. Consider what it would mean for the universe to be inconsistent, particularly in relation to the astronomical observations that are the basis of this conversation.

All we can say is that the universe has been consistent so far, during the brief time we observed a small part of it given the instruments we have.

We update our model(s) so that it keeps being consistent and predictable to us (that’s human nature), but no model can be probably correct and complete.

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