Comment by LarsDu88

Comment by LarsDu88 10 months ago

20 replies

If the plasma jet is wildly larger than our entire galaxy, I wonder if some sort of exotic life could evolve inside the jet. Some sort of life that would be totally rare in the universe.

Retr0id 10 months ago

Sometimes I wonder if our whole universe is some kind of transient aberration, if you zoom out far enough

  • LarsDu88 10 months ago

    For all we know, we live inside some large scale invisible jet and our entire understand of physics is really the exception rather than the rule

  • killthebuddha 10 months ago

    if you zoom out far enough, there's no other option (imo)

jadbox 10 months ago

Not my field, but could the Big Bang have been a massive black hole that "spat" out jets of plasma that formed into new stars and galaxies? I call this the black hole big burp theory.

  • ziddoap 10 months ago

    This is very close to an idea known as "Black hole cosmology" -- basically the idea being that the visible universe is inside a black hole, leading to a sort of "nested multiverse".

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-hole_cosmology

    A related theory, rather than being inside a black hole, is that the other side of a black hole is a "white hole". As matter collapses into a black hole, it is emitted from the white hole, creating another universe.

    Here's an article from 2010 that expands on the idea, though this is definitely not the first time (or last time) it was discussed, it just happens to be an easily searchable article.

    https://www.space.com/8293-universe-born-black-hole-theory.h...

    • idbehold 10 months ago

      I'm sure it's not practical, but I always thought it would be interesting if instead of living "inside" a black hole, the visible universe was simply being consumed by a black hole so large it just encompassed everything outside the visible part. So no nesting, the universe just eventually gets consumed entirely by one black hole.

      • mystified5016 10 months ago

        Unsure if the math actually checks out on this, but I was told that if you add up the observable mass/energy in our universe with the same average density we see now, you get a black hole with a Swarzchild radius around the size as the observable universe.

        One could then quite reasonably argue that our universe is indeed inside or is itself a black hole.

    • Buttons840 10 months ago

      In this "universe is inside a black hole" theory, is mass 1-to-1 with the "parent" universe? In this theory, are we inside a black hole containing billions of galaxies worth of matter?

      An average black hole has 50 suns in it, 50 times the mass of our star, that would be a universe without much matter.

      • ziddoap 10 months ago

        To preface, this is not my field (space stuff is just an interest of mine), and this specific theory is more on the fringes than most so I haven't spent a significant amount of time thinking about it.

        >is mass 1-to-1 with the "parent" universe? In this theory, are we inside a black hole containing billions of galaxies worth of matter?

        My understanding of the theory is that the proposed parent black hole which our universe is inside would necessarily have to contain all of the mass that we detect in our observable universe. So our universe would be 1-to-1 mass of the parent black hole. The parent universe would be larger (and may contain many black holes, each with a nested universe).

        >An average black hole has 50 suns in it, 50 times the mass of our star, that would be a universe without much matter

        Indeed! It's interesting to think that perhaps we are on one of the "lowest" layers of the nested multiverse, and perhaps there are only a few dozen (or whatever) layers below us until there is too little mass in that universe to create any more black holes. However, there could be an infinite amount of layers "above" us.

        I am curious to where the 50 solar-mass figure comes from, though. Is this excluding super-massive and ultra-massive black holes (which are on the order of 10^6 to 10^11 solar masses)? My intuition says 50 solar-masses is orders of magnitude too low for the average mass of a black hole, but I've never really looked into it

    • jadbox 10 months ago

      Wow, thanks for the resources! I actually never heard of a living universe 'inside' a black hole.

  • bobbylarrybobby 10 months ago

    This seems incompatible with inflation

    • jadbox 10 months ago

      Isn't universe inflation already on shaky ground though? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cosmic-inflation-...

      • jraines 10 months ago

        Interesting read. Her proposal for a “bounce” cosmology sounds like it has a neat explanation for why things appear smooth, but as far as why/how the universe should bounce at all (especially given current consensus that the current universe will NOT bounce) are only briefly gestured at (“promising recent work”, to paraphrase).

        Has that work developed and found traction among physicists in the 7 years since the article?

      • [removed] 10 months ago
        [deleted]
chasil 10 months ago

You are getting a single plastid. No more, no less.

tiffanyh 10 months ago

> I wonder if some sort of exotic life could evolve

Some might say humans are exotic life that evolved.