If you fall into a black hole, you'd better hope it is a big one — Stephen Hawking
I was watching the Stephen Hawking biography on PBS the other night, and Prof. Hawking makes the above sardonic quip in one brief scene. It’s a throwaway line in the documentary. But it got me thinking about politics.
Prof. Hawking is (of course) right.
None of us have the danger of falling into a black hole (of any size for that matter). The closest black hole to Earth is 1500 light years away. These far off objects are a fascinating subject difficult to grasp (especially for those who study them) and are full of paradoxes and contradictions. One of the craziest contradictions, which Prof. Hawkings is referencing in his quote, is that the larger the black hole, the easier it would be, in theory, for you as a human being to safely approach it, to get up close in a space suit and have a look at its boundary. You’d think the bigger the black hole, the more menacing it would be. But no.
To explain this contradiction, let's start with what the astrophysicists call a stellar mass black hole. This is the object left over from the fantastic explosion of a progenitor star much larger than our own. Our sun is far too small to leave a black hole — we need to start with stars weighing 30 or more times as much as our sun. The stellar mass black hole left over from the explosion still weighs as much as a handful of our suns (a lot of the progenitor mass is lost in the explosion). Black holes, by being incredibly dense, are also really small. That small 3 stellar mass black hole? It is just 5.5 miles across. An able bodied person can easily walk 5.5 miles. The moon is giant in comparison, at 1100 miles across. But all that mass of 3 suns? It's packed inside that 5.5 miles. That's 1,000,000 earths squeezed into a sphere 5.5 miles in diameter. And with all that mass in such a small space, there's a lot of gravity. A lot! And that gravity does weird things. Let's say you're in a space suit, and you're falling towards a black hole feet first. As you approach this object, which again, is only 5.5 miles in diameter, the gravity at your feet (the closest part) becomes notably stronger than the gravity at your head (the part away). Hundreds of miles from this small black hole, that difference would be enough to ..., well, the process is called spaghettification.
A human being could not get within hundreds of miles of a stellar mask black hole to avoid the fate of being stretched into a piece of spaghetti. And I promise you this will get to politics.
There's always a bigger boss, and stellar mass black holes, as terrifying as they sound, aren't the largest black holes. There is a class of objects, called supermassive black holes, with millions (or even billions) of stellar masses. One of them, Sagittarius A*, lurks at the center of our galaxy. Here's a music video that has nothing to do with actual supermassive black holes.
So when we tried to approach the stellar mass black hole, we were ripped apart hundreds of miles away from the edge. What about these supermassive black holes? It turns out, you can, as a human being, “safely” approach the boundary and slip inside, with no ill effects. This is all hypothetical, of course. It was only until recently that we even imaged a black hole.
But here’s the important thing: you could, without noticing, pass inside the boundary of a supermassive black hole and not realize it. There may be no sensory cue that you crossed the invisible boundary of inside versus outside.
Of course, the difference of whether you are inside or outside that boundary, called the event horizon (no, not the crappy movie), makes all the difference in the Universe. Outside the black hole, even tantalizingly close, escape is theoretically possible. You can continue to have a future in time and space. Inside, however, all world lines lead to the center of the black hole. Every future you have, no matter how hard you try, ends up at one point in space. You could exert a lot of energy, and exist inside the event horizon for a very long time, or head straight for the center in a relatively short period of time. Either way, you’re ending up at the same place.
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I’ve been thinking about politics since Biden’s victory. A lot. I’ve been coming to Daily Kos since 2004, changed user names around 2009, and occasionally have written diaries. I appreciate our community diary writers who continue to produce such excellent content, even when it isn’t easy. There was nothing I could say about Trump that wasn’t already said better by better people here. So I’ve been lurking. But what to do with all this pain these days? What to do with all this fear and anxiety? And finally it dawned on me: start writing diaries again.
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The impetus for returning to writing diaries was an article in editorialboard about a future of multiracial politics in America. The article is John Stoehr interviewing Thomas Zimmer:
“Battle lines have been drawn: The American right has decided Democrats are not just a political opponent with whom one might agree on some things and disagree on others, but a fundamentally “Un-American” faction that pursues a fundamentally illegitimate political project of turning the country into something it must never become – from a nation of and for white Christians, first and foremost, to a land of multiracial pluralism.” — Thomas Zimmer
I became politically aware in the late 90’s, and early 00’s, with the introduction by unfortunate people in my life to talk radio; hate radio, and the rhetoric of eliminationism. Back then was a long way from the Flight 93 Manifesto written on the even of the 2016 Election, but a straight line can be drawn from the dark recesses of second and third tier talk radio celebrities to our present politics. Things are just clearer now.
With Democrats on the losing side of polls fitting the pattern of every modern President, the media has warmed over the stale talk of Democratic messaging problems, appealing to working class voters, appealing to rural voters, appealing to Hispanics, and so on. All this chatter is background noise, and misses the reality of the moment.
“I think we need to grapple with the fact that a large portion of the electorate has decided that their overriding concern and political interest is to prevent the country from ever becoming a truly functioning multiracial, pluralistic democracy.” — Thomas Zimmer
And the closer we come to becoming a truly functioning multiracial pluralistic democracy, the greater the resistance from the right. This is the opposite of what many liberals anticipated, myself included. You’d think losing 7 of the past 8 popular votes would temper them. It’s the opposite.
I have a great memory of Rush Limbaugh’s first show after the 2012 Midterm, 48 hours after Romney’s loss to an election Republicans believed was in the bag.
The Republican establishment essentially conceded in those first few hours to a multiracial pluralistic future. Tuning in for schadenfreude, I was shocked when Limbaugh thundered two days later “no you dare not!” Limbaugh, as a historic navigator of the party away from multiracial pluralistic democracy, would prevail. The Republicans would abandon their autopsy, use fortunate midterm elections in 2014, and Donald Trump in 2016, to justify staying their course. Since then, every setback, every loss is a justification to move more towards the opposite: white, male Christian authoritarianism.
But that doesn’t change the facts. America is becoming less white and less religious faster than anyone expected.
...which brings us to this point of transition.
John Stoehr: “... are we in a period of transition between what I have been calling regimes, between the era of Ronald Reagan, as it were, starting in the 1980s, and a future era yet to be known?”
Thomas Zimmer: “I certainly think it is very useful to think of our current moment as a period of transition. And that’s indeed partly a transition away from the Reaganite consensus.”
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Come for the politics, stay for the astrophysics.
Without any evidence to support my argument other than personal feelings and an addiction to the news, I cannot help but feel we have crossed an event horizon of American politics. As with a black hole of sufficient mass, our senses cannot perceive that fateful crossing. But crossed it we have, and all world lines now lead to a single place; the stage has darkened and the curtain has closed on a different future. Whether we take a long time or a short time to reach it, I don’t see any intervening force than can alter our course. Will democracy fall? Will we fall into an authoritarian totalitarian christo-facist state? Or will we arrive at a truly functioning multiracial, pluralistic democracy?