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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

A mass of 6x to 7x our sun (size of this object) would start messing with solar system orbits well before it got here. Not that that would be much better for us!

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Yeah it wouldn't just sneak up on us. We would have years and years to worry and hypothesize before finally just dying.

> finally just dying

Is this what would happen if we got slurped into a black hole? I was hoping for something more exciting …

It seems hard to see a way that life forms survive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification.

I thought you ended up behind a bookshelf.

Well, we hit a little snag when the universe sort of collapsed on itself. But dad seemed cautiously optimistic.

We would most likely freeze to death. As the black hole crossed the asteroid belt we would be pulled away from the sun as it started to compete with the black hole's gravity. Depending how fast the black hole was moving we might die over a few months or we might freeze to death in a few days. Probably there are paths where the earth would briefly be pulled into an elliptical orbit, and then we would be burnt to a crisp as we circled back close to the sun.

In a chaos such as that we would get killed by the weather before we even realized what was happening.

This is the setting of one of my favorite short stories, A Pail Full of Air.

Which I am delighted to note, since the last time I referenced it, appears to have fallen out of copyright, so I can link straight to it on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51461/pg51461.txt

Barely enough time to recruit a bunch of lovably gruff leatherneck astronauts to drill a hole in it and blow it up with a nuclear bomb.

Wouldn't it be quicker to train some drilling experts how to be astronauts though?

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