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Vassilis C. Militsis: Into the Black Hole

Into the Black Hole

Sic itur ad astra¹(Aeneid, IX, line 641)

By Vassilis C. Militsis

The S.S. Sanduleak – 69 a behemoth of a ship, in her uncouth immensity resembling more a city than a star faring vessel, was racing at relativistic velocities heading for the planetary system around Tau Ceti, a G-type star, similar to our sun, twelve light years distant. The Sanduleak–69 had been designed for any imaginable deep-space mission and exploration. It boasted of extensive facilities and comforts. She had been built to be thoroughly self-supporting, capable of recycling air, food and water for hundreds of years and, if necessary, of spanning the length of the galaxy, provided the subsequent crew generations preserved the knowledge to maintain her. She was equipped with two drives: external ignition nuclear pulse rocket and matter-antimatter thrust astrodrive.

She set off from Earth some thirteen years ago, gradually accelerating with her nuclear pulse within the solar system at a million kilometers an hour until within a year she reached the Kuiper belt beyond the lopsided Pluto’s orbit, fifty astronomical units, in other words fifty times of the average distance between the Earth and the Sun or more than six light hours. Leaving the solar system she switched on her astrodrive and in approximately three years she was still hurtling through space at a steady relativistic acceleration until she attained the ultimate speed of fifty per cent that of light upon arriving in the vicinity of Tau Ceti.

Countless centuries ago man managed to reach and explore this planetary system around Tau Ceti, without finding any sort of life. The distance was covered in twenty-two years. The crew had been alternately in suspended animation. Now the system serves a supply station and a stepping stone to timeless travel. There she was bound to encounter the artificial cosmic prodigy created by humanity itself. This stupendous feat has been the ultimate triumph of man in this century, after he had long before conquered interstellar travel.

As mankind progressed through the ages economically, socially and intellectually, the scourge of war and racial discrimination had been for good banished. Economic growth had reached such an extent that there was more than enough for everyone. Medical science had not only wiped out disease but also prolonged life expectancy considerably. The entire Globe was an economic and political entity. Mankind was at last united for the first time. Science was so advanced that all people had shaken off the burden of labor which was taken up by automatic machines. Energy was unlimited as the solar power was harnessed. There was no more pollution or nuclear contamination. Each individual could pursue his or her desired task or remain idle if they wished so. As resources in the planet had been depleted, mankind started exploiting the planets of the solar system before venturing into deep space.

Centuries had gone by in blissful peace and mankind ran the risk of stagnation until one day an extraordinarily unprecedented event occurred. The CETI² huge receivers around the globe registered odd blips originating in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 163,000 light years distant. After extensive analysis the astronomers concluded with certainty that those signals were messages from intelligent beings, very similar to humans. Further analyses showed pictures of those creatures and of their planet orbiting around a G-Type star, approximately the same distance from it as the earth is from its sun. They had a striking resemblance to man and breathed oxygen in a nearly terrestrial environment. They had also evolved culturally and technologically but they were not as developed as humans to venture in interstellar travel. However, great abysses of space and time separated humans from them. Even if people could reach almost the speed of light, it could take them more than 200,000 years for a one-way trip.

A couple of centuries went by and communication with our distant “brethren” continued. Scientists in the meantime were making frantic research for generations to tackle the problem and find a satisfactory solution. Then they postulated that it was possible to travel instantly from one point of the universe to the other making use of a black hole. They calculated that by aligning a ship along the equatorial rotation of a black hole and matching the speed of the ship with that of the spinning hole, they could take advantage, according to Schwarzschild’s and Kerr’s equations, of the navigable aperture, a thin slice, near the equator, where the centrifugal force counterbalances the crushing gravity, and diving into it, they could through another dimension or hyperspace exit timelessly by a wormhole into another part of our universe, thousands or millions of light years away. Else, crossing a black hole at another angle, one was liable to fall into its fearsome singularity and be crushed to annihilation. Simulations also proved that such a venture could be realized. However, such a cosmic monster was not in reaching distance from earth.

Then a genius, after long study and research, elaborated a theory of creating an artificial black hole. The economic growth of humanity was prodigious and they could afford unimaginable expenses. Theorists and technologists worked very hard and constructed automatic ramjets to sweep colossal quantities of interstellar matter and accumulate them at a safe distance from Earth, at least twenty light years away and in the vicinity of T – Ceti, as there was no form of life to be at risk in the nearby systems. After innumerable generations this gigantic task was completed and the accumulated mass of interstellar matter began to compress by its gravity and rotate around its axis. At last it reached a point where at its center the pressure was stronger than gravity triggering nuclear reactions and finally this mass turned into a bright star. It was calculated that the new star should reach and surpass the so-called Chandrasekhar limit, which is 1.39 solar masses, the critical mass of a star to turn into a black hole. However, this artificial star was ten solar masses and by creating enormous charge shock waves around it, the superhuman technology of the day succeeded in accelerating the process of turning the star first into a white dwarf and afterwards into a collapsar. According to current theories, as soon as a black hole is created, a white hole comes into being at some other point of the warped space-time. The two monsters are joined by an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a gateway to hyperspace, through which one could pass instantly and safely to the other end of the pair. Now scientists were waiting for implementation to find out whether it worked.

As soon as this superhuman feat was achieved, scientists and technologists sent through the hole collapsible computerized machines, which having been programmed in advance, they created another black hole at the other end of the pole of the existing one and a white one shone automatically becoming visible from Earth. The theory was triumphantly proved correct. Thus a round trip to remote reaches of the universe was possible through this two-way cosmic portal, in the vicinity of T – Ceti.

The ship on her astrodrive thrusters raced on accelerating at many percentages of the speed of light. In less time than eighteen years now they would reach the cosmic portal and then try to travel to the Large Magellanic Cloud in the blink of an eye. Scientists had postulated, after arduous mathematical computations, that the artificial gravity well of the black hole had caused the fabric of space-time to fold upon itself at a point some eleven light years from the system in the Large Magellanic Cloud, whence the messages of intelligent life had been received on Earth. Therefore, some twenty-four years of interstellar journey to the Black Hole, then instantaneously through hyperspace to its white hole counterpart and afterwards another twenty years journey until the two civilizations met. As life expectancy had been considerably prolonged, a round-trip journey would take only less than two generations. The black-white hole pair could not be built any closer as the project could have caused total extinction of any sort of life in a four light-year radius, because of the lethal gamma ray radiation produced by such a tremendous collapsar, the size of ten solar masses.

As the colossal starship was accelerating, her screens displayed remarkable images. Some screens showed space according to the output of visible light and others the space fabric schematically, where the presence of the stellar bodies caused a sort of curvature in the spacetime continuum. At relativistic velocities bizarre occurrences also took place: At 14% of light speed the stars ahead turned bluer and brighter. But if you looked back, you would see yellow stars change to orange, and red ones fade gradually into infrared, vanishing completely. These unfamiliar changes were caused by the so-called Doppler Shift of the starlight towards both ends of the spectrum as the ship hurtled faster toward or away from the source of light.

At 30% of the speed of light an illusion was created that all the stars ahead began clustering together as though determined to block the ship’s course. All constellations were seemingly drawn forward and distorted.

As the ship sped even faster, the stars appeared to be crammed into a barrel shaped arc around it, and if it could reach the velocity of 99% of light – nothing material can travel at or faster than the speed of light – the starlight would turn into a spectacular spectrum-colored circular band that astrophysicists have called it the Starbow. That would be all the passengers would see in an otherwise jet-black sky.

The vessel had now reached almost her final speed, half that of light. For people on board everything was normal. Time was sped by and the crew was looking forward to reaching their first destination. However, if people on Earth could observe what transpired on board the vessel, they could notice the following odd events: according to the special theory of relativity the ship herself had shrunk by 86.60% along her motion, the time had dilated from sixty to 52.10 minutes and her mass had increased at 115.47%.

The captain, the officers and the crew worked on and off; the crew went in suspended animation alternately. Useful information was being collected during the journey and new phenomena were observed. Steady electronic lights blinked on consoles of instruments lining the bulkheads. Above the consoles spectrographic displays filled various screens, reducing stars and nebulae to coded colors and numbers.

When finally The Sanduleak-69 reached the vicinity of the monstrous black hole, a larger screen was monitoring it and its halo of destruction around it, both visually and schematically. Still another screen showed the collapsar region in magnificent color and size. The black hole was a dark nothingness resting in the center of a glowing vortex of radiant gas and larger chunks of matter. Subatomic particles turned into plasma, and light itself disappeared into the tremendous gravity well. As matter was torn apart by the unrelenting gravity, it gave off energy in the form of lethal X-ray and gamma radiation. It presented a mesmerizing view of the stellar maelstrom. The pull and its gravity surges that rippled the fabric of space made one aware of a steady thunder reverberating around him. Right in the middle of the vortex was the fearsome singularity, just a point at the Planck length⁴ of infinite density where all physical laws collapse and from where light is bent inwards unable to escape. No information can be obtained from that region, the rim of which is called the event horizon beyond which all is lost forever. The cosmic monster loomed ahead like the yawning maw of Beelzebub, a true gateway to Hell. This ten solar-mass collapsar had been reduced to a mere 59 kilometer diameter with a navigable aperture of 600 meters at its equator. Viewed edgewise it looked like a fast rotating flattened disc bulging in the middle. It rotated at 1,000 revolutions a second or at 400 million kilometers per hour or a little more than 11, 000 kilometers per second. On approaching the hole the ship had to match her speed with that of the black hole’s spin.

The enormous vessel approached dangerously the awesome collapsar and carefully maneuvered her course along the rotational axis of the black hole. Her astrodrive accelerated her at the necessary stupendous speed to match with the carousel of the spinning equator. Everyone sensed the tremendous centrifugal forces, which jarred and jolted the whole ship, trying to shred it to pieces. All crew were now awake and alert working frantically at the instruments to make the necessary calculations in order to enter the navigable aperture. The critical moment finally came and the Sanduleak-69 dived swiftly into a seemingly gray slice. Then an extreme stillness engulfed the ship in a grayish ambience. They were now past the event horizon and hurtling relentlessly through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge to the white hole and to another section of the universe. Now they were in hyperspace, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, nor matter nor energy, both something and nothing. Now one could cross the length of the Galaxy in a timeless interval. The people on board ship were overwhelmed by a momentary quaint sensation of insideoutness, an unfamiliar perception apparently felt only in hyperspace. While not actually “seeing” or “feeling” in the literal sense of the words, they were aware of the existing cosmos they had just timelessly left behind. They perceived space-time universe warped and distorted like a crumpled sheet of paper, bent and folded, the crevices of which were crammed with clusters of stars and galaxies. Past, present and future events appeared static and fossilized in space-time continuum. Man has eventually penetrated the realms of a reality beyond his grasp. So far he had been captive in time and entropy; events in his universe were evanescent originating in the past, fleeting through present and heading to an uncertain future. Hyperspace, he realized, is the mold of known creation.

Man is inevitably bound to travel along the arrow of time

Heading relentlessly to the end of entropy,

Where all vanishes into chaotic heat.

What is past is irreversibly lost, a hazy print in our memories.

This is fleeting reality. A biological illusion perhaps?

The transcendental reality is otherwise.

It exists beyond the limits of our known universe.

There, nothing is lost. Space and time is interchangeable.

Past, present and future are the same,

Limned indelibly on the eternal canvas of hyperreality

Hyperspace is a different universe, much larger than our own, obeying different natural laws that appear as chaos to intelligent entities of our universe, which emerged from it when it came into existence 15 billion years ago after the Big Bang. In this domain of hyperreality, perfection reigns supreme. The π is a perfect number and there are no irrational or transcendental numbers. For the first time Man has made the breakthrough into other unimaginable dimensions and has delved into the secrets of Creation

Where in the boiling exchange of space and time

There comes the total collapse of all natural laws.

But as man wanders in the implacable realms of chaos,

The tekmor³ through the poros belches him out into the perceived cosmos

And he hears the creative wisdom of the WORD:

‘Let there be light’, and ‘there was light’.

Shiva has performed the perennial dance of Creation.

Finally and instantaneously the starship was spewed out through the wormhole into the familiar space-time of our universe.

Armed with new experience and understanding, Μan has realized his common destiny with the cosmos, both with animate beings and inanimate objects. He has tasted anew of the tree of knowledge of good and evil but this time he was rewarded with being shown the way to the stars. Thus he was now fully prepared to meet his distant brothers in the Large Magellanic Cloud system, a score of light years away, for large cosmic vistas lay ahead of them to jointly conquer.

Notes:

¹ This is the way to heav'n. Transl. by John Dryden

² COMMUNICATION WITH EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE

³Tekmor is a mythical primeval Ancient Greek goddess, related with the limit and end of life. In the cosmogony of Alcman (7th century BC), she appears together with Poros (path) immediately after the creation. (Wikipedia)