A small, lone black hole could be on an intersecting trajectory with us within a few years and we’d be completely oblivious.
Still not super likely, but I would think far more likely than a direct hit by a black hole.
Is this what would happen if we got slurped into a black hole? I was hoping for something more exciting …
Which I am delighted to note, since the last time I referenced it, appears to have fallen out of copyright, so I can link straight to it on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51461/pg51461.txt
I’d probably welcome the quicker demise tbh
I may be misunderstanding the distances involved but wouldn't such a collision take centuries if not thousands of years to play out? For the most part it would just look like we had 2 suns, one of which gets a few millimeters bigger (to the naked eye) every year.
With all that said, maybe it's better off if we were completely oblivious.
even that would be a slow death I suppose. Don’t think the Earth would just vanish instantly.
1) the Earth being flung out of the Sun's orbit
2) planetary orbits becoming disrupted such that an encounter with another planet over the coming years or millennia becomes likely,
2.1) which could eventually have the same "flinging away from the Sun" effect,
2.2) or (unlikely, but possible) result in a collision
2.3) or result in the Earth being shredded into asteroids
2.4) or other planets suffering that fate and then showering the Earth with dangerously-large asteroids over a period of decades or centuries until it's nearly, or actually (think: outright crust liquefaction from impacts) lifeless.
than the Earth actually getting swallowed up, by at least an order of magnitude.
IOW, the most-likely "we're all dead" outcomes for us, from a close encounter with a massive rogue anything really, including a black hole, might take years and years to play out.
But any specific random example, is often brutally hard to see.
Have you seen the Walking Dead?