![]() Of course we can’t do that right now, and maybe won’t ever be doing that again. We would have 1,200 people shoulder-to-shoulder in a sweltering hot hall-a beautiful, three-story-high old ironworks factory-for a conversation on animal consciousness, or many-worlds, or a conversation with Richard Dawkins. “I am the director of sciences there-I started the science studios there-and we have a lot of live events, or we used to, pre-pandemic. And maybe we could have a novel about mathematicians’? So I feel very fortunate to have those collaborators.” Otherwise I don’t think I’d get anything published, if commercial appeal was-I mean, do people really think, ‘Oh, I’d love a book on whether the universe is infinite or finite. I find that they really believe in the book as the book should be, and they don’t buckle to that kind of psychology, mercifully. ![]() “Everyone was really excited about the concept of this sweet little book, and I think once it arrived, we were all delighted with how tiny it is. And check out some highlights from the discussion below. Listen to the complete interview with Janna Levin in Episode 442 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). “If you knew you had a year to live, but wanted to see your grandchildren born, you could go on this epic journey, so that your children have time to grow up, have their children, and you get to see your grandchildren born,” Levin says. Due to time dilation, those messages could reveal the entire sweep of future history. A person who flew into a supermassive black hole could survive for as a long as a year, and would still be able to receive messages from outside. It would be very, very hard to get a lot of power out of it.”Īnother possible use for black holes would be to see beyond your lifespan. Maybe we’d have to make it out of the moon, or a giant Earth-sized magnet. “I think I concluded we would have to use all the resources in the solar system, essentially. ![]() “I once tried to imagine what it would take for a black hole battery to power New York City,” Levin says. You could float right across, and not really realize anything was happening, because there’s nothing there.”ĭespite their fearsome reputation, black holes can be safely manipulated with gravity and magnetism, and it might even be possible to draw power from them, though doing so won’t be practical any time soon. “And if you crossed the event horizon, it would be completely undramatic. “If you were in empty space with complete darkness, and you were right outside a black hole, you wouldn’t know it was there,” she says. But Levin says the reality is much different, and that you might fall into a black hole without even realizing it. ![]() A century of sci-fi shows have conditioned us to think of black holes as whirlpools in space, violent maelstroms that reach across the void to suck in passing starships. ![]()
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