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Post-Modern Drunk: What I Did After Being Sucked Into A Black Hole
Whoa!
I mean, we were expecting that, weren't we, but that was a helluva trip! CERN has a lot to answer for, I can tell you what!
I normally don't use exclamation points all that much, but I figured the destruction of our planet by the creation of a miniature black hole which immediately swallowed us all whole and compressed us down to a point in a weirdly time-shifted fashion was worth a couple of !!!s. I mean, it's not like this stuff happens every day.
I don't know about your experience being compacted into a superdense mass, but mine was pretty interesting. I was sitting on the couch--I've been sick, you know, so I wasn't at work. I guess it would have been a different experience if I'd been at work--listening to the TV on the Radio album Return to Cookie Mountain, and I was thinking how much I was looking forward to their new album, coming out in a couple of weeks, actually, and regretting that my computer was broken and wondering how I was going to get the album, then, and then suddenly
BLAM.
Actually, it wasn't so much of a BLAM, but it sure felt shocking. There was this enormous sucking, and suddenly, I kind of sort of ceased to exist! I mean, you know how it goes. You've ceased to exist too, in the same way.
I mean, that wasn't what I was expecting, at the very least. I'd read a lot about black holes when I was a kid. I was fascinated by them. I wondered if they were, like, entrances to other dimensions. I guess I got them crossed with wormholes, which we don't know exist outside of Star Trek and things like that.
I'd heard about things like the event horizon, which is the line where if you pass, you're not getting out of the black hole. I wasn't quite sure what that meant, other than you shouldn't cross the event horizon, but we weren't really given that choice this time, were we?
I even had some vague memory of the Chandrasekhar Limit (and I'm sure I've misspelled that), which I think if you're over you become a black hole (if you're a star, that is), and if you're under, you just supernova or nova and die out. I thought that was cool. Not as cool as a black hole being an entrance to another dimension, of course, but I'm older now, and a supercompressed bit of matter, so my interests have changed a bit from when I was a kid.
So. What do we do now?