Could a human enter a black hole to study it?

13 othello 3 7/25/2025, 8:10:04 AM theconversation.com ↗

Comments (3)

seanhunter · 1d ago
Betteridge’s law of headlines says that any headline that ends with a question mark can be answered with the word “no”.

Could a human enter a black hole to study it? No. Like obviously not.

Nevertheless, it’s a very fun and interesting article. Great quotes include:

   This implies … that the black hole’s pull on a person will differ by a factor of 1,000 billion times between head and toe, depending on which is leading the free fall. …

   The person would experience spaghettification, and most likely not survive being stretched into a long, thin noodlelike shape.
positr0n · 1d ago
> Could a human enter a black hole to study it? No. Like obviously not.

That is incorrect. With a large enough black hole the event horizon is not a significant feature at human scale. Spaghettification will not occur. A human could easily dip inside the event horizon without damage.

Though of course once you go in there's no going back out!

karmakaze · 1d ago
Obviously yes (if you think about event horizons of different sized ones).

> there is a [...] catch: A human can do this only if the respective black hole is supermassive and [...]