Space

Are Aliens Hiding Inside Black Holes?

Last week, NASA unveiled the first ever image of a black hole. It looks like an orange donut, a mysterious eye in the dark vacuum of space.

Image: Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al.

But the question has never been what does a black hole look like? The real question is how are aliens involved in all this?

No, I’m not talking about the story from March about how aliens might be using black holes to invisibly power their weird halo drive starships. I’m talking about the story from several years ago, about how aliens might actually be living in hidden star systems inside of black holes.

Yes, that one.

Russian cosmologist Vyacheslav Dokuchaev and his team at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences proposed the strange idea back in 2011: That alien civilizations with sufficiently advanced technology could hypothetically navigate through a black hole’s event horizon without being destroyed.

What’s more, he suggested they could “live safely inside the supermassive black holes in the galactic nuclei being invisible from the outside.”

Take that, Fermi paradox. The aliens have been hiding out in black holes this entire time!

If a black hole were particularly massive and you could venture beyond its event horizon to the more stable inner Cauchy horizon, Dokuchaev wrote, the tidal forces and radiation could be weak enough that, from his description, inside you’d actually find something not unlike the Solar System.

“The naked central singularity illuminates the orbiting internal planets and provides the energy supply for life supporting. Some additional highlighting during the night time comes from eternally circulating photons.”

Imagine: A hidden system of planets orbiting the singularity of a black hole, with “circulating photons” in place of stars. Gathering energy not from the Sun, but from that same singularity.

All a hyper-advanced alien civilization would need to do, then, is journey inside the black hole and park their ship (or find a planet) in orbit around its singularity. And neither we, nor anyone else in this universe, would ever know or be able to find them beyond the event horizon.

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Rob Schwarz

Writer, blogger, and part-time peddler of mysterious tales. Editor-in-chief of Stranger Dimensions.