They’re SO Misunderstood
How many of you have seen ANY movie or read a bad science fiction story that featured a black hole that had people somehow flying into a black hole and managing to get out again? I remember this really awful movie from Disney called (imaginatively enough) “The Black Hole” that pretty much ignored most physical laws and violated more than a few storytelling rules. It seems like black holes suck more than gas and dust and stars into their maws. They also have the strange ability to remove a writer’s common sense when it comes to a) tellling a credible story, and b) respecting that black holes have rules they must follow and that you can’t bend those rules just so that the hero can get the girl in the end.
Let’s face it. If you’re in a spacecraft anywhere NEAR a black hole, you’re going to feel its effects. Its gravitational pull will tug at you. The radiation environment will kill you, unless your spacecraft is really well-shielded. And even then, there’s a good chance that you’re never going to father (or mother) children after the encounter (provided you survive it). If you happen to stray too close to the black hole, you’re toast. You’re going in and you’re going to be swirling down the celestial tidy bowl for a LONG time (from the perspective of an outside observer). From YOUR perspective, it’s going to be a short, nasty, brutish trip into the universe’s ultimate trash compactor. And, no matter how much a producer or writer or art director or second assistant key grip wants to see your spacecraft escape the black hole, it ain’t gonna happen. You won’t have a droid up there in the control booth trying to turn off the compactor at the last second. You. Are. Toast.
So, you might ask me if you’re one of those writers who just HAS to have a black hole in your show to keep the sponsors happy, what CAN be written about? IS there a viable, exciting story about these things that could hold an audience’s interest?
Of course I have an answer to that, mostly because I DID write such a story some years ago for a planetarium show. I had the spacecraft go not quite close enough to the singularity’s event horizon and the pilot pulled out just in time… but not before a few hair-raising, nail-biting moments when both the crew and the audience weren’t sure if they’d get out in time. I had twenty minutes to get them out TO the black hole’s vicinity (all the while explaining how we can detect these dudes), and then about five minutes to put them in danger and get them out again. By standards of a movie or network TV, that’s pretty short, but it kept me intellectually honest, and I told a good story with accurate science and emotional affect (as they like to say in the business).
So, it can be done. And black holes, if you respect them and what they’re about, can give you fodder for a LOT of good stories.
Black holes, as the old bumper sticker said, suck. They also don’t have any hair, as Stephen Hawking once said. They gobble up stuff like stars and gas and dust, and they don’t give anything back. You can’t tell anything about them by simply looking at them, although you can infer their masses by the gravitational influence they have on material around them. And, you can tell that one is around by the heat and x-rays and other signals given off by the material that spirals into a black hole. And, if the supermassive black hole has a jet, you can detect THAT. But, all of the mass they take in stays there and the information about it stays secret forever. It’s a sort of cosmic version of “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”