Black Holes Suck: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

'''Carter''': Everything about that statement is wrong.|[[Stargate SG-1|SG1]]: "200"}}

 

...Unless it's fiction. Sometimes they just suck in everything around them like giant [[Space X|space-vacuum-cleaners]], seeing as [[Gravity Sucks]]. Also, commonly, a black hole will be represented as an actual hole in space, and it's perfectly possible to enter a black hole and leave it safely. Relativistic time dilation tends to be ignored; a character voyaging into a black hole can leave it without time warping, while those outside can see things enter a black hole without slowing to a crawl. Hovering black holes are often seen as weapons.

 

 

== Anime & Manga ==

* In [[Diebuster]] {{spoiler|a giant space monster managed to absorb the black hole he was trapped in and turn it into a weapon. When the heroes destroyed him, they accidentally ''split the black hole in half'', almost causing a new Big Bang. They managed to save the day, in a way that even one of characters admitted is beyond human's understanding.}}

** Hilariously enough, the original series, ''[[Gunbuster]]'', was actually a lot better with this than most modern depictions: {{spoiler|when the aforementioned black hole is spontaneously created in the midst of an enemy fleet, the animation depicting it is fairly accurate: the accretion disc is the only visible part of the thing, which otherwise looks like a giant spherical void, complete with particle discharges from the poles. And the gravitational effects of having a black hole only a few hundred AU's from Earth are touched upon.}} Of course, there's still the idea that an overloaded spaceship engine could create a black hole in the first place, but this series also has Inazuma Kicks, so...

* Towards the end of ''[[Shakara]]'', the title character rigs the Museum of War to trap the [[Big Bad]]'s soldiers that pursue him. The weapons he use are black hole bombs, each of which creates a black hole about the size of a basketball when it detonates, and immediately sucks up his pursuers.

* There's a comic in [[Marvel Star Wars]] which involves the ''Millennium Falcon'', piloted by Luke, playing chicken with a Star Destroyer and a black hole and managing, through the Force, to take subtle maneuvers at the very edge of their personal event horizon. The Star Destroyer tries to follow the maneuver and doesn't manage.

 

 

* In ''[[Galaxy Quest]]'', black holes are regularly treated as wormholes, to the point interstellar travel (by starship or sheath) is done by diving into them and coming out... uh, the other side.

* ''[[The Giant Spider Invasion]]'' has the eponymous beasties arrive through a black hole that landed in a farmer's field. Without anything being sucked into it, natch. At the climax of the movie the black hole is saturated with neutrons and apparently neutralized, which causes all the spiders to burst into flames and ooze ice cream. Yes, it's a very bad movie.

 

 

* ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' both uses and partially averts this trope on a couple of occasions. In one episode, the Stargate connects to a planet falling into a black hole; the fact that time slows down near a black hole is used both as a plot point and for dramatic effect (our heroes must watch an unfortunate SG team on the doomed planet try to reach the gate - they keep running, but can never reach safety as time slows to a crawl for them, and the 38 minutes the gate can stay open passes in under a second.). In another episode, the evil Replicators use a black hole's distortion of time and some [[Applied Phlebotinum]] to escape from its accretion disk (at least it was made clear they weren't trapped in the black hole ''itself''!) Of course, as with everything in Stargate, moderately plausible science is liberally mixed with [[Rule of Cool]], and black holes get to interact with Stargates (and ''[[Deus Ex Nukina|nuclear weapons]]'') in lots of interesting ways.

** In another episode, the team combines a Stargate, Explodium, Technobabble, and a black hole to dial the Supergate and keep the Ori out of the Milky Way. Points for McKay telling Mitchell that it's not the black hole he's looking at, it's the accretion disk. Not that Mitchell cares.

* [[Red Dwarf]] once featured a "White Hole," which supposedly spewed out all the matter black holes sucked up...and the ''time'' too, which doesn't make a lick of sense. At the very least, you'd think it'd be physically impossible to ''drift into'' one.

** You actually cannot enter a white hole, just like you cannot leave a black hole.

* The pilot episode of [[Andromeda]] did quite well in averting this trope until the very end, when they escaped using [[Depleted Phlebotinum Shells|"Nova Bombs"]] to turn the black hole into a ''white'' hole.

* On ''[[Heroes]]'', a minor character named Stephen Canfield has the power to make Unrealistic Black Holes with his mind. {{spoiler|He eventually kills himself by creating one and being sucked inside it.}}

** Of course, considering {{spoiler|the planet was a cage for Satan, and proceeds to lose its orbit once his cell is opened, killing the Beast...}}

** If the planet was actually well inside the event horizon, and only protected by the gravity-cancelling tech, this would be closer to reality, including the narrow "funnel" of space allowing access to and from the planet.

** Also, {{spoiler|there's a castle in it.}}

* The blackholes in [[Spore]]. They're covered in lightning, you can fly right up to them and, with the right upgrade, ''through'' them and out another black hole. Another wormhole confusion example.

* You can create a black hole in ''[[Scribblenauts]]''. It sucks in everything within a certain radius and destroys anything that touches it. And it evaporates after a few seconds.

** That's actually fairly realistic, if you're willing to fudge the masses and timescales by several orders of magnitude. Although it really should evaporate in a very loud BANG, to be strictly accurate.

** And in the sequel, spawning a black hole causes it to suck up any nearby objects for a few seconds. When the few seconds are up, it expands and consumes the entire stage, protagonist included. And it cannot be removed once spawned.

** To give the game credit, at least they show death by compression into a singularity when it does hit you.

* The instructions for ''[[Crystal Quest|Crystal Crazy]]'' describe black holes as "rifts in the space-time continuum that instantly transport you from one place to another. Actually the time bit isn't really correct. Neither is the continuum bit. Or the rift. But it sounded good."

* Lampshaded in ''[[Star Wars]]: [[Star Wars Expanded Universe|Empire at War - Forces of Corruption]]''. The map description for the Maw - a black hole cluster which has no effect on in-game spacecraft - claims the following:

* The ''[[Geometry Wars]]'' games feature Gravity Wells, a semi-sentient enemy that drifts benignly towards you, doing absolutely nothing. If attacked, it burns brightly, and starts drawing in everything nearby (to add to their mass), sometimes allowing them to orbit it. The gravity increases with the size of the Well. The only way to end the Wells is to shoot them to chip their mass away. And the gravity multiplies if multiple Gravity Wells are allowed to try to engulf each other (they just dance around each other), to the point your craft cannot escape the pull. Oddly, Gravity Wells will split and repel your firepower, meaning you have to draw close, shoot, and use the gravity to slingshot yourself to safety.

* In the [[Interactive Fiction]] game ''[[Gateway]] II: Homeworld'', the [[Precursors|Heechee]] have hidden away from the [[Cosmic Horror|Assassins]] ''inside'' a black hole. The only way to get through it is with a specially-modified Heechee ship that can survive entering a singularity. The game even goes so far as to describe the devices that allow that to happen.

* In ''[[Star Trek Armada]]'', black holes are just background objects, unless a ship's engines are disabled. Then they start to fall in and can be destroyed. No time dilation though.

* In ''[[Star Trek Starfleet Command]]'', black holes are [[Space Is an Ocean|blue whirlpools]] that suck in your starship if its engines aren't strong enough to escape.

* In ''Haegemonia'', black holes are giant shiny funnels in space that ''sound'' like a twister. Getting close to then is not recommended. They show up rarely though.

** And when they do, they continuously damage every ship in a large radius (probably due to the fact that real-life black holes are major radiation hazards). In the only campaign mission where one shows up, the player's second in command warns that "our larger ships are already having trouble keeping themselves away from it". What is unrealistic is that there is a pair of nebulae barely a single AU away from the black hole; how they managed to avoid being sucked in is a mystery. Another unrealism is the fact that the accretion disc is VERY fast when it should be very slow due to relativistic time dilation.

* One is created after the defeat of the final boss in ''[[Sonic Colors]]''. The final level is Sonic trying to escape it. {{spoiler|He fails around the 31 second mark.}}

** As a bit of further explanation how this odd effect came about: The original revealed Black Hole ability did in fact destroy the units. However, it was probably changed for balance reasons, but the graphics were not changed.

* In the ''[[Touhou]]'' fighting game ''Immaterial and Missing Power'', boss Suika Ibuki creates black holes using her ability to manipulate density. They can draw in the player character but do not damage the terrain and are not instantly lethal.

** The {{spoiler|final dungeon}} in ''ME 2'' is a space station orbiting a black hole at the centre of the galaxy inside the accretion disc. It is possible to fly a spaceship around the place without getting burned or irradiated to death. The event horizon itself is visible in the distance, lacking gravitational redshift but having an unlikely size for something that would have a diameter of 10% of Earth's orbit in real life.

*** Mordin does speculate the area to be protected by powerful mass effect fields and radiation shields, which at least is an attempt to justify being able to pilot a ship within.

* The [[Nazi Zombies]] mini-game of Black Ops has a small hand-held device<ref>Named the Gersch Device</ref> that when you press a few buttons and throw it the device generates a small black hole which sucks in all nearby zombies and which closes within a short period of time. Realistically the entire facility the character was on would have been sucked into the black hole if it were anything like a real one. What makes it even stranger is that the creator of the device notes that it was meant to be a portable teleporter which is proven if the player decides to jump into the black hole as it will teleport them to a random part of the map, so this makes you wonder why it acts as a destructive black hole on the zombies but only functions as if it were a worm hole if you touched it.

* ''[[X-COM]] Interceptor'' has semi-realistic black holes that can adversely affect travel on the interstellar map. They can suck in probes (and do so from a surprising distance away) and ships traveling near them are slowed by a significant amount as they try to escape the event horizon. The plot itself is set off by the discovery of an intercepted alien message that shows massive fleets flying into a black hole. It's initially suspected this is some kind of bizarre disposal method, but eventually it's discovered that {{spoiler|the aliens have figured out a way to turn black holes into wormholes to a [[Pocket Dimension]]}} where they are building a literally indestructible superweapon. The rest of the game turns into a race against time to find a way to counter the superweapon.

* The ''Space Cadet'' pinball has a kickout called "Black Hole" (oddly enough, it's white). There's also a mission named "Black Hole Mission" where you've to lit all the engine lights [[Captain Obvious|and send the ball to the "black hole"]]. When you accomplish it, you get the message "Black Hole eliminated".

 

* ''[[Megas XLR]]'' had Coop create a black hole once to defeat a villain, while still in [[Joisey|New Jersey]]. How does Coop get rid of it? By creating another black hole and the two somehow cancel each other out.

** This is ''slightly'' [[Hand Wave|HandWaved]] by the fact that it was called a "matter-antimatter rift", though the intent was there. A more straight example was in the second episode, when [[Bruce Campbell|Magnanimous]] threatened to throw Kiva and Jamie into a "Quantum Singularity", described as a "black hole, but portable and with a cooler name." It was ''roped off'' to prevent things from getting sucked in, and the only thing to be so unfortunate (Magnanimous himself) eventually escaped largely unharmed, save a scar he got fighting an [[Eldritch Abomination]] within it. Additionally, Magnanimous was only sucked in because he touched the Event Horizon, which [[Rule of Funny|made the whole space station blow up.]]

'''Arthur:''' Fight it, Tick! Fight that black hole! }}

* "John [[Blackstar]], astronaut, is swept through a black hole, into an ancient, alien universe!"

== Real Life ==

* A lot of fears about the Large Hadron Collider are really fears that Unrealistic Black Holes reflect reality. [http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0810/0810.5515.pdf Two] [http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/anthropicshadow.pdf papers] have been written which concern this issue.

** The final fate of the black hole is unclear, but most likely they'd disappear in a giant explosion, leaving perhaps a small remnant. Note, however, this process would take a ''[[Time Abyss|very]]'' long time, much larger than the current age of the Universe, at least for stellar-mass black holes and above.

* [http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/rn.html Here's a cool video] simulating the fall into a black hole followed by the pass through a wormhole to finally arrive to another universe.

 

[[Category:Tropes in Space]]

[[Category:Reality Is Unrealistic]]

[[Category:Space Does Not Work That Way]]

[[Category:Artistic License Astronomy]]

[[Category:Everything's Better with Spinning]]