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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, you wouldn't be any less dead if you fell into Jupiter and that's a lot easier to get to

Crossing into the event horizon of a black hole has a very profound poetry to it in that you will never be able to communicate back your findings. I find the romance of the destruction of knowledge very intriguing - falling into a black hole is similar to shooting a mathematician in the head in that regard.

Great way to go, all things considered.

Yes you'd be dead.

I am prepared to put down MTW and dream

Except that with a black hole this small, you'll be pulled apart by the tidal forces long before you even reach the event horizon. If you want to make it across the event horizon intact, you need a much larger black hole, like the one in the centre of our galaxy.

Which conversely means that supermassive black holes allow you to pass through the event horizon unharmed.

Not sure if you meant it that way but information actually can't be created or destroyed in quantum mechanics. This is known as the no-hiding theorem [1] which has been experimentally proven and which leads to the black hole information paradox. [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hiding_theorem

2. ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox

So, is it kind of like a cryptographic hash function?

Somewhat. Like a hash function, it projects some large state space (the hash input/you) onto a different state space (hash digest/2d-surface of a BH). But a hash digest actually has lost information, i.e. it's guaranteed by pigeonhole principle that some two inputs have the same digest, which means you lose the information about which one it was. Whereas a black hole scrambles you, but none of the "bits" are actually erased, just smeared out and projected onto the surface.

Falling into Jupiter is an eye-opening experience tho, esp. if you fall into the "big eye" (pun intended).

Just the sheer massive size of a turbulent, harsh planet that covers all the horizon... The world becomes flat much faster near such a planet.

We're already on a planet that covers the horizon; some say there's more beyond the horizon. Would Jupiter look subjectively bigger, if you couldn't also see the Earth for comparison?

I guess it wouldn't, but it probably would be a much longer fall until either pressure is crushing you or your heatshield fails.

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