Multiple combination wrenches (spanners). Most other brute force methods are obviously out.
Use a hex bit on the bolt, one small wrench to grip the bit and chain a few wrenches together for leverage. They will wrap around in an approximate circle for a small space.
I was thinking a chemical drill of sorts. A package of exothermic reactions to melt the way down. Then you’d actually need to drop an ultralong extending straw down (I admittedly don’t know how to solve this one, but my material science/mechanical engineering isn’t very strong) and slurp up a sample for onboard analysis. Otherwise you’d be limited to only those components you could fit into a transmitting sensor.
Perhaps a repurposed garden hose on a spool could work. I recently saw a pretty long one on sale on amazon and they sell extensions. As long as we’re making stuff up I feel like this should work nicely ;-)
Drilling slowly through ice with heat isn’t a very spectacular claim, at any rate. You’d need to keep the descending arm heated too I suppose, otherwise it’d all get stuck as it refroze behind the drilling area. But the sheer distance is the only potentially currently impossible hurdle, off the top of my head. Gravity is providing all the force you need, no motors should be needed. Use a radioactive, low output heat source. You’re not in a hurry or anything.
I’ve seen this pop up a few times, but there are a couple big issues that pop up right out the gate.
Space is constantly expanding with no center. If we’re in a back hole, we and everything else in here are cruising toward the singularity. And if we’re in a black hole, we’re already passed the event horizon, the point at which gravity is so strong that even light can’t escape; and as we progress toward the singularity, that force becomes exponentially stronger… so light from one point inside the black hole would have very limited potential to cross paths with another point… so how is it light from stars is actually making it to us / for the few stars we’re actually in the line of fire for it’s light - if that’s even possible inside the event horizon - shouldn’t the night sky only have a narrow region of visible stars; and shouldn’t they appear distorted as s all hell?
It seems like you are making the assumption that time and the laws of physics follow the same rules inside the singularity. If we ourselves are inside a singularity, the net result was enough matter to create our known universe… but maybe in the next layer down matter behaves differently and stars can be produced on a smaller scale. Or maybe the matter is heading towards its own scale of big-bang. And what if time contracts to the point that the life of the black hole, and its relative size, corresponds to the life of that universe and its expansion?
A story which comes to mind and presents an interesting theory that could apply here can be found in He Who Shrank.
We’d be somewhere between the event horizon and the singularity - once we’ve made it to the singularity we’d just be crushed into it to join the infinitely dense speck of matter.
Between the event horizon and singularity we can still exist as a unique object/entity, we just can’t move any matter/energy from the inside out.
But once we reach the singularity, we just become more mass in the singularity. No more me, or you, or Earth, etc: just singularity.
The time it takes to move from event horizon to singularity would scale with the size of the black hole, so I guess if the singularity had enough mass to generate an event horizon the size of what we understand to be the universe, then yeah the trillions of years it would take for things like Earth to form, life to develop, etc could all happen as we move closer to the singularity, but we run into the snags like the ones I mentioned in my first post - the observable universe would all be on a crash course toward the same point, and not uniformly moving away from everything as space expands; and the further out we look into space, the more distorted it would become: distant galaxies wouldn’t appear as neat discs, but as stretched lines. We could even use that distortion to infer the approximate location of the singularity and gauge how much time is left before we’re smashed into it.
But you’re still judging all of this based on our current laws of physics, or that anyone even knows for certain what is occurring within a black hole. Also remember that time loses all conventional meaning once you pass the event horizon. Now compare that to what we think we know of our own big-bang… that we believe all matter started as a singularity, and that in the initial expansion both time and the very laws of physics were quite muddy and took a bit to settle into what we know today. Within the black hole we don’t even know if the concept of matter still has the same meaning – what appears as a known value of X suns to us could resolve to a whole universe if the physics change.
I’m curious why you think the matter coming it to a black hole would be observed are rushing towards the singularity? We’ve already seen just how insanely that much gravity distorts the perceptions around the outside of a black hole, so why wouldn’t the same be true on the inside? Our own universe has a finite amount of matter, and yet the space it is ‘contained’ in wraps around on itself so there is no center. The boundary of a black hole could potentially create the same result – a threshold that we could never cross, but also a wrapping of the space within back onto itself. Also consider the unknown nature of time, what if all the matter that will ever be consumed by the black hole feeds into that singularity while simultaneously exploding into the life of a new universe? In a place where time doesn’t exist, all of time would happen simultaneously, so from another viewpoint the billions of years (not trillions) that comprise the history of the life and death of our universe could happen all at once. We know that as we look back towards the time of our own singularity the math surrounding time and space break down to a point where they no longer have any meaning. The same is true for what happens inside a black hole, it all breaks down and become meaningless under our current math. Until we know more about what is happening, or find some way to peer back before the big bang, you really can’t discount the idea that what happens inside a black hole could be similar to the creation of a new universe. What appears to us as stringification could be the result of the math showing us the entire history of a moving object instead of a single point in time. Hell we don’t even know if time works the same way, maybe once you cross the event horizon time starts moving backwards and what we see as everything moving towards a singularity appears in there as a universe expanding away from it.
Yes all of this sounds like fantastical sci-fi stuff. Then again, what we know about the birth of our universe and how space and time are warped within a black hole also sounds like fantastical sci-fi stuff, and until we have a better grasp on the nature of all of it, there’s nothing yet that proves or disproves if a whole universe could exist inside a black hole.
I mean, yes I’m assuming they follow the laws of physics. To my knowledge everything about them that we actually can observe does actually follow the laws of physics (including things like time dilation), and we can use what we do know to form a pretty solid hypothesis about what we don’t.
I mean, I could argue that they’re actually c’thulu eggs, and you can’t prove me wrong because we can’t look inside! …but there’s also no evidence to support that. Drawing conclusions about reality based on science fiction is silly. We ofc don’t know everything about the universe, but we should stick with what real evidence actually supports.
I find it unlikely that the laws of physics apply within a singularity, the place in which there exists more matter than is possible to exist in a single point. Plus, information/matter is effectively shredded and turned into particles by the black hole. There is no way for scientists to empirically prove what actually happens after entering the event horizon, so holding out for evidence is folly. Perhaps you could be more theoretical with your theoretical physics.
Yeah I agree that we shouldn’t try to contradict the evidence we have without a good hypothesis to back it up, I just feel like we’re still at a stage where the mathematics give us an idea of what might be possible, but that is seriously constrained by our limited understanding of what happens at these grand scales. Without letting your mind wander to the possibilities of what could be, we would never take the time to look beyond what we know. I’m just trying to say that our knowledge of the subject is still greatly limited, and this idea can’t be ruled out completely until we know more. In the meantime, what if someone did seriously explore the notion? Perhaps they’ll find proof that shows it can’t be possible, but perhaps they might also stumble upon a idea even more fantastic.
Yeah I agree that we shouldn’t try to contradict the evidence we have without a good hypothesis to back it up
That’s what I’m saying though - the hypothesis that we exist in a black hole does contradict the evidence currently available. Or at least I think it does - I opened the contractions initially as a question because this isn’t my area of expertise. I’ve had a few relevant classes, and have a casual interest in the topic, so I think I have a pretty solid foundation at least; but ultimately I’m just a medic, so I was kinda hoping someone with a more dedicated background would chime in.
There’s a LOT of BS surrounding the topic of black holes - and understandably so. They’re intriguing as hell, so it’s no wonder that they’re so often the object of artistic freedom. But all’s fine and well to proclaim that they’re some kind of portal, or mini universe, or cleverly disguised alien spacecraft, or even a sentient creature… in the context of science fiction. But to say any of those about black holes IRL should come with supporting evidence, especially if some aspect of the proposal clashes with our current interpretation of what we can either directly observe or indirectly postulate.
In ALL liklihood,this was something teresstrial in origin. Radioactive dust, even just car headlights getting reflected by a raindrop or something could do it…
Another idea is that they weren’t stars at all. The three bright points are within 10 arcseconds of each other. If they were three individual objects, then something must have triggered their brightening. Given the timespan of about 50 minutes, causality and the speed of light would require they were no more than 6 AU apart. This means they would have to be no more than 2 light-years away. They could have been Oort Cloud objects where some event caused them to brighten around the same time. Later observations couldn’t find them because they had since drifted on along their orbits.
I like this idea. There’s something shark in the water-ish about having three more planet(oids) in the solar system that we only caught a glimpse of for an hour in 1952. It reminds me of Melancholia.
Nope. MOND is not the answer. It is never going to be the answer. There are too many things that MOND cannot explain. One of the reasons why planet 9 was hypothesized to exist is because the orbits of objects far from the sun are out of plane in weird highly elliptical orbits not explainable through modification of gravity’s effects at small force scales. Dark matter is another phenomenon MOND was meant to explain away but cant. i.e the bullet cluster is an object with less than 1% of its mass accountable by visible matter. MOND cannot make up the difference. Structures like this are only explainable if dark matter actually exists. The best MOND can hope for is to account for some but not all, of the discrepancy.
I hit up the Wikipedia article. Much like a typical episode of PBS Spacetime, it was just enough over my head to feel within reach while simultaneously hammering home that I was never meant to be an astrophysicist.
The best MOND can hope for is to account for some but not all, of the discrepancy.
Your last sentence kind of shut down the whole preceding "MOND isn't be a thing!" Part of the comment.
Sure, it doesn't seem particularly likely that MOND is a thing. But given that science always allows for old theories to be disproven, and our theories of how gravity works are already known to be incomplete or otherwise shaky, I wouldn't shut down any researchers who want to give it a go.
The issue is that MOND is being marketed as being able to fix things that we already know it isnt capable of fixing. This is the astronomy equivalent of an experimental drug tauted to cure cancer rather than a specific form of it (if it works at all.) The biggest issue I have with MOND is that the mechanism for modified gravity isn’t derived like relativity was (i.e relativity has a mechanism that naturally leads to its equations) but designed post facto to fit observations. i.e a0 was not derived from scratch, it was curve fit. A curve that does not appear to explain ultra diffuse galaxies which are apparently essentially free of dark matter. If MOND had some theoretical basis behind it beyond “stars in galaxies go brrr” and could explain the apparent lack of deviation from newtonian gravity of ultra diffuse galaxies, it might have deserved more attention.
I mentioned galactic rotation curves because thats more or less where it began. If MOND fails to fit the data at those scales, it will necessarily fail within our own solar system at the outer edges where a0 would potentially be relevant.
There are many variants of MOND. RelMOND, for example, includes features that resemble dark matter more closely.
I'm not saying "it's gotta be MOND", of course. I'm just reacting to what I perceive as an unnecessarily hostile reaction to it. We have yet to actually figure out dark matter either, after all, and there are many variants of dark matter that have been proposed. So the "it's designed post facto to fit observations" is a complaint that can be directed against it right now too. I see nothing wrong with exploring all the options, especially when it's by people who have chosen to spend their efforts doing that for themselves.
None of them are based on anything though. Theyre curve fitting models which is why I am hostile to them. Show me a mechanism that derives what a0 is from scratch.
Basing a model on how well it fits a curve rather than on a mechanism that naturally derives the curve from scratch is essentially worthless.
Without a mechanism that explains why there needs to be a MOND dominated regime in the first place, its just too susceptible to being pathological science.
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