1490
well?
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It's just black holes all the way down.
Is it not more like all the way out?
Wait... Are we simulating black holes yet?
One has to wonder lol.
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.
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....
Difference being that we understand dark matter exponentially more than dark energy. We can actually observe it's gravity affecting light.
There's also been some major leaps in dark matter physics in the last few years. Revisiting primordial black holes using lasers and microlensing might actually be able to get supporting evidence here before long if the hypothesis holds.
PBS Space Time has a good video breaking this possibility and methodology down.
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.
How do we predict the total mass of the universe?
I think it's a combination of at least three things.
Cosmic Microwave Background radiation gives us a pretty good idea of the energy/mass density in the universe at a fixed point and age of the universe. If you take the densities estimated from the CMB and multiply it by the estimated size of the universe at the time the CMB (380k years after the Big Bang), then you get the total mass.
Second, we can just look for what we can see. I think there have been large-scale surveys done to estimate total mass/energy in the universe.
The third estimate has to do with something called 'critical mass' - we observe the overall 'curve' of space to be very close to flat. I'm talking the geometry of space; two parallel rays of light do not ever cross or diverge. For this to happen, there needs to be a certain average density of mass.
Wikipedia has the mass of the observable universe listed as 1.5×10^53 kg, although this can go up to 10^60 kg at the higher ends.
If we plug the Wikipedia numbers into the Schwartzchild radius formula: r = (2GM) / (c^2)
Where G is the gravitational constant, M is our mass, and c is the speed of light:
r = (2 * 6.67408 * 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2 * 1.5*10^53 kg) / (299792458 m/s)^2
r = 2 * 10^43 m^3 s^-2 / 8.988 * 10^16 m^2/s^2
r = 2.225×10^26 meters
r = 23.52 billion light years
Wikipedia lists the radius of the observable universe as 46.5 billion light years.
So... given the Wikipedia numbers, the universe would need to be half the size it is now to be a black hole. At these scales, being within an order of magnitude is... fine.
If we bump up the estimate of mass to only 3x10^53 kg, then the Schwartzchild radius equals the size of the observable universe.
So it's within the margins of error of our current estimates that the Schwartzchild radius of our universe would be the current size of our universe.
Approximately
Light from stars tells us how big they are then adjust for things that don't emit light by looking at how objects move (i.e. gravity). Objects in this case not necessarily being single entities but often groups of things like entire galaxies. This is basically how dark matter became a thing. Scientists were like "hey theres waaaay more gravity moving things around but we dont see any objects causing it...."
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There's also cyclic conformal universe theory, put forth by Penrose.
Where once you have an empty enough space.... its mathematically indistinguishable from a singularity.
So, if its true, then yeah, we could be inside of a blackhole/singularity.
At this point, that doesn't really matter.
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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.
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.
When I first saw pictures of galaxies as a kid I noticed they all looked like black holes.
In a way we're all just bits of organic matter mid-flush, waiting for the Drainpipe of Destiny
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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
I mean, the model was first developed in the 70s so maybe not that specific guy
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Scientist: Scientific discoveries are meaningless when taken out of context.
Journalist: Scientific discoveries are meaningless.
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Nah really it was probably some small thing the media got a hold of and just ran with. I think you're spot on
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I can barely afford rent!
Well... the good news is you can stretch your income a bit further with spaghettification!
nuclear pasta is very energy dense
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May be that's why it sucks to live here.. It's related
Man I really wish we had super fast space travel like star wars...
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
Look up vacuum decay. It's theoretically a thing that can rewrite spacetime at a lower energy level, and would expand out from a point in a bubble. The expanding bubble would erase and rewrite everything it touched into the lower energy level.
Yes I know what vacuum decay is, and the thing I referenced, the inflaton field, is a hypothetized false vacuum near the very start of the universe, that went through this exact process, giving rise to our current vacuum and ending the hypothetized inflation era
I know there's a hypothesis that our current vacuum could be metastable as well, but that's a seperate thing
Yeah, I believe the Higgs field showed us to be metastable, unless new findings have invalidated that.
no my vacuum is working fine, thanks
But is your refrigerator running?
Haven't been able to get the fucker to stop after storing my meth in it!
I think she's on lap 24,512 now.
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Okay, so now you can barely afford your rent inside a black hole. Enjoy the enhanced granularity of your desperation!
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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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