Well, when you consider how dense some people are...

Alice through the Looking Glass ... ?

"Black holes could be portals to a parallel universe."

~ Stephen Hawking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdGEHmAOKsA



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/29/2017 08:19PM by Amyjo.

1)They are places of absolute darkness. Light and time, not to mention all sorts of interstellar material, disappear into them, never to be seen or heard from again.

2)They are places of absolute finality. Nothing ever escapes them. Ever.

3)They are places of intense, absolute pressure, so great that molecules and atoms are compressed to virtually nothing. Pressure creates heat. An astral physicist I know says the heat would be "off the charts," X degrees to the nth power.

4)If a conscious, sentient being or instrument were to go in, he/she/it could see out of it, but since the black hole captures light (and time), an observer (or instrument) outside of it could not see, or communicate with, the being or machine inside it.

Now: I'm a Christian who takes the Bible seriously, but not always literally. I never accepted "fire and brimstone" as an accurate description of Hell, merely the poetic imagery of a place of absolute loss and despair, the worst the Bible writers could conceive of in ancient times.

A black hole is an extraordinary image of the *qualities* that the Bible ascribes to Hell.

1)There is no escape. Ever. It is a place of absolute, irreversible finality.
2)It is a place of darkness and heat beyond measurement or description.
3)A person in a black hole would be absolutely, inconsolably alone and separated from anybody* and anything else, especially God. ("God does not hear the prayers of the lost," possibly because nothing -- not even prayer-- can overcome the hole's gravity (see #4).

I present this as a spiritual analogy, not any kind of insight. But since the "fire and brimstone" imagery is 2,000 years old and very hackneyed now, I think the black hole imagery is more vivid, combining the empirical and the poetic. Sure, people have speculated about "alternate" and "parallel" universes, but just as the atheists are quick to point out that "nobody's come back from the other side to tell us anything" (which, as a Christian, I dispute), nobody has sent an instrument into a black hole to tell us what's there--it's all speculation.

Perhaps black holes have the souls of the lost? I wouldn't go that far, but I find the similarities intriguing. Whatever the genuine reality of Hell is, I have not intention of finding out.


*I'm always annoyed by the flippant wisecrack, "Oh, I'll go to hell and party with all my friends." Phew!

Except for the fact Hawking says theres no such thing as a Black Hole, since they leak Hawking Radiation (Plasma jets) proportionate to the bodies they consume and are therefore, gray holes.
Turns out the Zen Buddhists had it right all along.
http://www.space.com/24418-stephen-hawking-no-black-holes.html

Thanks for the link. In a way, my analogy of black-hole-as-image-of-Hell holds true.

According to the more common concept of black holes,"information," matter and energy (and for my purposes, souls) goes into a black hole where it is kept forever. It remains intact in a beyond-calculation compressed state. And there it is, forever and ever, amen.

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." (Dante, "The Inferno.")

Now, on the little bit I learned from your link (thanks, Koriwhore), Hawking is espousing a kind of firewall (or "chaos wall" as one critic calls it) which will rend matter and information (and souls?) apart in beyond-comprehension cataclysmic fury. Thus matter (and information, and, by extension, souls) cease to exist--are extinguished.

This second (Hawking's) thesis corresponds to the "extinction of the soul" doctrine of Hell: that the lost will, after a horridly vicious act of incineration, be destroyed--cease to exist. (It's a minority position, held by JWs, 7th Day Adventists, and a few others.)

Again, I emphasize that I use the physics of black holes as poetic analogy. What really happens to the lost is not known in any detail, and I have no desire to find out.

Last thought: Classic Christian doctrine holds that the Cosmos was created by God, "ex nihilo," out of nothing. For centuries, this has conflicted with the scientific axiom that matter and energy are constant, neither created nor destroyed. If Hawking is right, and matter (and energy, and maybe souls?) can actually be destroyed--eliminated from the bounds and scales of the Universe--then perhaps matter and energy CAN be created from nothing. This would require an Agent outside the bounds and dimensions of the Universe.

We came from black holes to become a black whole. See https://resonance.is/observations-hint-new-recipe-giant-black-holes/

And giant spiders COULD come out of your ass.