If we are in a black hole, then the thing you feared most about falling into a black hole must be bullshit since we are quite fine. Relative to the vastness of shit in the universe, anyway.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
1485 points (98.9% liked)
Science Memes
15991 readers
765 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- !abiogenesis@mander.xyz
- !animal-behavior@mander.xyz
- !anthropology@mander.xyz
- !arachnology@mander.xyz
- !balconygardening@slrpnk.net
- !biodiversity@mander.xyz
- !biology@mander.xyz
- !biophysics@mander.xyz
- !botany@mander.xyz
- !ecology@mander.xyz
- !entomology@mander.xyz
- !fermentation@mander.xyz
- !herpetology@mander.xyz
- !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !medicine@mander.xyz
- !microscopy@mander.xyz
- !mycology@mander.xyz
- !nudibranchs@mander.xyz
- !nutrition@mander.xyz
- !palaeoecology@mander.xyz
- !palaeontology@mander.xyz
- !photosynthesis@mander.xyz
- !plantid@mander.xyz
- !plants@mander.xyz
- !reptiles and amphibians@mander.xyz
Physical Sciences
- !astronomy@mander.xyz
- !chemistry@mander.xyz
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !geography@mander.xyz
- !geospatial@mander.xyz
- !nuclear@mander.xyz
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !quantum-computing@mander.xyz
- !spectroscopy@mander.xyz
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and sports-science@mander.xyz
- !gardening@mander.xyz
- !self sufficiency@mander.xyz
- !soilscience@slrpnk.net
- !terrariums@mander.xyz
- !timelapse@mander.xyz
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I took a physics course at a community college over 20 years ago and one of the things that stood out to me was the professor telling us not to overthink or assign too much romanticism to the idea of black holes.
His message was basically “it just means the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light… if you plug the size and mass of the universe into the escape velocity formula, the result you get back is greater than the speed of light, so our entire universe is a black hole.”
If this was being discussed at a community college decades ago then I think the new discoveries aren’t as revelatory as they would at first appear to the general public.
Nah really it was probably some small thing the media got a hold of and just ran with. I think you're spot on
On the contrary; while I have heard the explanation that the commenter you replied to has said I have also heard a slightly different theory:
Our universe is the 3 dimensional event horizon of a 4th dimensional black hole. By extension we may find that black holes in our universe have similar funky 2 dimensional areas at their even horizons.
I am sure clickbait articles are part of it but there also seems to be several actual theories surrounding the idea of the nature of our universe relating to black holes.
load more comments
(31 replies)
Scientist: Scientific discoveries are meaningless when taken out of context.
Journalist: Scientific discoveries are meaningless.
load more comments
(4 replies)
another thing I learned at some point: Just because a physics formula returns a result, doesn't mean that it's reality
TBF black holes themselves were originally just the result of a Physics formula, but they eventually turned out to be a "reality". Sometimes that shit happens, yo.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Orr, you’re missing the obvious alternative here - the guy was a legendary level scientist, but the government stole his research and threatened his family and sidelined him into being a community college professor so that no one pays attention to his “drivel” so that they continue to control us into being workers for the capitalist pigs
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(11 replies)
This is a postulation not a discovery.
Someone did a weird math thingy that gave a word result and this was how they tried to explain it. There's been zero confirmation this is actually the case. Just like they can't decide if dark energy/matter is a thing.
Dark Matter/Energy is just a placeholder for stuff we can detect or see influencing things we can detect but have no friggin idea what it is yet. It could be many different things all at once; or nothing and we just got some other things about what we observe wrong. It's just a symptom of taking what we know from observing the universe and reconciling it with what we know about math, and trying to make a mathematical model that recreates the universe as we have observed it.
We have a theory for expansion of the universe. It is called "the big bang theory".
However according to the math our universe should slow down expanding, but we can observe it is speeding up. Solution? Dark Energy.
There are models that try to simulate the orbits and shit of things we can see. Now those models aren't working however... Solution? Dark matter.
This is very run down concept of what dark matter and energy is. Basically shit we need for the math to work out to the observation we make.
However I don't think we are inside a black hole. This would mean that instead of mostly nothing our universe would be cramped with matter....
If you take all the mass in our universe and run it through the Schwarzschild equation, you get a black hole with about the same radius as our observable universe.
Things don't need to be tightly packed to be a black hole, there just needs to be enough stuff in an area.
load more comments
(7 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
I can barely afford rent!
Well... the good news is you can stretch your income a bit further with spaghettification!
load more comments
(2 replies)
Okay, so now you can barely afford your rent inside a black hole. Enjoy the enhanced granularity of your desperation!
That would explain why it feels like my bank account is being sucked dry.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
What if we're not in a black hole, but in the aftermath of a vacuum decay event?
That is literally what the current big bang theory says! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflationary_epoch?wprov=sfla1
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(6 replies)
I mean, we can talk about it for a bit, Angie, if it’d make you feel better, but that’s really about it, honestly.
Ok I've been meaning to ask this in the Space community or the NoStupidQuestions community. I've seen this news circling around the past 2 weeks and have been watching videos of people talking about it.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think the gist is that astronomers discovered with the JWST that some galaxies at the end of the observable universe appear to be younger than they are supposed to be. So it kinda blows a hole in the big bang expansion where objects farther away should be older. And that somehow ties in with the theory that our universe is inside a blackhole.
It's fascinating but I don't know what to do with that information other than just be fascinated. I think it was Neil deGrasse Tyson who said "So what does this new discovery matter to us? Nothing", because us being in a blackhole doesn't change anything in the grand universal scheme of things.
From what I've seen, it's not that they're "young" galaxies, but that they shouldn't have had enough time to develop if the universe were truly so crazily homogenous from the big bang. It doesn't necessarily disprove the big bang, just means the universe might not be as "smooth" as previous assumptions.
Any scientist worth their salt should be readily able to admit it was always an assumption, just one that proved congruent with observations until now.
load more comments
(24 replies)
NOT "discovered inside black hole", just gained further theoretical evidence for the Earth being in a less dense area of the universe. There has been actual evidence of such for some time (at least a decade), but there is uncertainty at such large scales so it cannot be called conclusive based only on a couple types of observation that may have erroneous procedures.
so basically We're out in butt fuck no where in space and the aliens aren't coming any time soon cause they essentially live in New York City and we're in a town in Iowa that no one has ever heard of.
typical.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(6 replies)
We should all be celebrating our good fortune, protection against a dark forest strike!
Except from aliens that are also stuck here with us
load more comments
(7 replies)
Anyone got a link to either nasa or a good article explaining it?
Scientific American points to an important fact.
"With our latest surveys, such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and Euclid, by my very rough estimation, we’ve taken pictures of somewhere around 100 million galaxies out of the two trillion or so estimated to exist in the entire observable universe.
Shamir’s paradigm-shattering conclusion relies on 263 of them."
They are discussing bias in the selection.
"Unfortunately, this kind of extreme selection introduces many opportunities for bias to creep in. When we test a new idea in cosmology—indeed, in all of science—we work to make our conclusion as robust as possible. For example, if we were to change any of these filtering steps, from the selection of survey region to the threshold for deciding whether to include a galaxy in the analysis, our results should hold up or at least show a clear trend where the signal becomes stronger. But there isn’t enough information about such methodological checks in Shamir’s paper to make that judgment, which casts doubt on the validity of the conclusions."
Both are fair and valid.
Peaceful science & good housing should go hand in hand.
May be that's why it sucks to live here.. It's related
view more: next ›