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Comment by Varkiil | Hacker News Reader

"In a big enough black hole, you could live out the rest of your life pretty normally"

Free falling in your ship and suit waiting for you to be crushed to death... pretty normally

As the article alluded to we are in many ways free falling and waiting to be crushed to death. It's just we are free falling through time rather than space.

It depends on what you mean by "inside" a black hole. If this means "inside the event horizon", well, if the black hole is big enough, you can put yourself in orbit around it relatively easily, you'll just never be able to achieve escape velocity. If you take the Earth for example, a geosync orbit has a velocity of 3.07km/s, whereas escape velocity is 11km/s

There aren't any stable orbits within the event horizon of a black hole (due to General Relativity):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_metric#Orbital_m...

Not so, only one of the two solutions is unstable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_geodesics#Circul...

Also, this applies only to circular orbits, and does not indicate that a powered ship could not maintain orbit.

Those orbits are all outside the event horizon. Inside it, all you can hope to do is fall inward as slowly as possible.

BTW most of what I know about black hole physics is from Greg Egan's novel "Incandescence". Which covers quite a lot of science for a work of fiction (and overall extremely inspiring).

http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/INCANDESCENCE/Incan...

Assuming you still have an internet connection... why not? :)

Well, guess TCP/IP is out, but maybe TV and radio broadcasts would still function.

Light (read: any electromagnetic wave) cannot escape a black hole beyond the event horizon. Therefore this wouldn't work.

Couldn't Anne just beam an electromagnetic wave of TV/radio into the black hole to you, though? Nothing will be escaping the black hole.

Just have Anne toss you DVDs of Game of Thrones from outside the event horizon.

Netflix would have to get really creative with their business model to support those subscribers.

but it can go in. You can still watch TV

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