Could a Human Enter a Black Hole to Study It – And Survive the Event Horizon?

This reminds me of a section of Niven’s “A World out of Time”

https://silo.pub/larry-niven-a-world-out-of-time-o-5405644.html

At worst he had found a brand-new way to die. He asked of the ubiquitous microphones, „Suppose we go too far in? We won’t ever die, will we? We’d be stopped above the Schwarzchild radius.“ „Only to an outside observer. Not to ourselves. Are you about to change my orders?“ Some minutes later he eased himself into the Womb Room chair. He sipped the last of the broth. „Full view.“ Don Juan raced above a sea of churning stars. In a normal galaxy they would have been crowded enough. Here, forced into a plane by the spin of the giant black hole at the center, they were crowded to death. Dying stars burned with a terrible light.

They stood like torches in a field of candles. It must be common enough for star to ram star here, or for tides to rip stars apart. Commoner toward the center, Corbell thought The center of the sea burned very bright ahead of him. He could see no dark dot at the axis. He hadn’t expected to. „How far away are we in normal space?“ „Rest space? Three point six light-years.“ „No problems?“ „I believe I can hold us above the plane of the disk until we have passed that very active swelling ahead of us, between two and three light-years from the singularity.“ Corbell looked down at his drive flame, a dim wisp of white between his feet. There was very little matter above the disk, he guessed. „Suppose you can’t? Suppose we have to go through it?“ „You’ll never feel a thing. That region is where the stars lose their identity. They become streamers of dense plasma with nodules of neutronium in them. Most of the light comes from there. Beyond, there is very great flattening and some radiation due to friction in the matter spiraling inward.“ „What about the black hole itself?“ „I still don’t have a view of it. I estimate a circumference of two billion kilometers and a mass of one hundred million solar masses. The ergosphere will be large. We should have no trouble choosing a path through it.“ „You said circumference?“ „Should I have given you the radius? The radius of a black hole may be infinite.“ There was simply no grasping the size of that disk of crushed stars. It was like flying above another universe. At two billion kilometers, the black hole would almost have contained the orbit of Jupiter; but if Corbell could have seen past that swelling ahead, that Ring of Fire, he would have found the black hole invisibly small. Light caught the corner of his eye, and he turned to see a supernova glaring whiteon-red. He’d just missed seeing a sun torn apart by tides, its ten-million-degree heart spilled across the sky. He asked what he had never asked before. „Peerssa, what are you thinking?“ „I don’t quite know how to answer that.“ „I’m not thinking anything. My decisions are made. They are mathematically rigorous. I face no choices.“ „How are you going to find Earth?“ „I know where Sol will be in three million years.“ „Three — ! Won’t it be more like seventy thousand?“ „We’re diving deep into a tremendous gravity field. Time will be compressed for us. The black hole is large enough that tides will not tear us apart, but we’ll lose almost three million years before I fire the fusion motor. What more can I do? The odds are finite that we will find Sol. Or the State may have spread through a million cubic light-years of space before we arrive.“ „The odds are finite. Peerssa, you’re strange.“ But Corbell felt no urge to laugh. Seventy thousand years B.C., there had been Neanderthal Man and a few Cro-Magnon. Humans. Three million years ago, nothing but a club-swinging, meateating ape. What would inhabit the Earth three million years from now?

Well, that’s the opinion of some.

1. by definition, they cannot be seen as nothing including light escapes them.

2. Hawkings Radiation-apparently does not exist as it pertains to the theory of BH existence, so it is not evidence of BHs.

3.Uncertainty Principle- states it is not possible to locate something exactly

4. The idea of BH is an attempt to explain another theory- the big bang, because mass ought to be evenly distributed throughout the universe but it is not, shooting (black) holes as it were, into that theory of origins ( besides, even my 3rd grade grand child asks where did the big bang come from, who made it go bang? ) and no, it did not occur because “it had to” like some famous dead guy declared. “It”, demands identity, an actor, not nothing doing something; irrational and illogical.

However, as in all science (body of knowledge) and research, seeking is important, but finding is not a function of consensus (ask Galileo, who actually read the Bible), the truth is always self-supporting and self-evident.

He Lives!

Yes, they survive and return to a very changed Earth. There are still people living there, although not many.

You can read the plot summary in eight paragraphs at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time

and you can download the entire novel online as a pdf at https://silo.pub/qdownload/larry-niven-a-world-out-of-time-o-5405644.html

If you decide you want to read other stories based in this alternate future timeline , I would recommend his books “The Integral Trees” and “The Smoke Ring”

Forty years ago I was a major Larry Niven fan, but lately I’ve found weaknesses in his writing style.

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