Infinite Black Hole Universes: The Black Hole Bigger Than The Universe

One can’t rule out the possibility that we’re living inside a black hole that’s inside a black hole that is inside a black hole, ad infinitum.
In other words, the universe that we see and everything around us could be black holes all the way down. In the book titled “The warped Side of Our Universe”, the American theoretical physicist, Kip Thorne muses:

Our universe is also endowed
with a marvelous, shadowy side that is warped —
phenomena forged
from warped spacetime.

If we are to examine the implications of the “black hole cosmology” and get our fists hitting hard over the question of whether the observable universe could be inside a black hole, the poem above might need a revision: perhaps “is also endowed with” might be replaced by “sprung out of“?

Image: Smitherman, D | Wikimedia Commons

Everything can become a black hole if you could just squeeze: the Earth needs to be squashed into the size of a ping-pong ball for it to transmorgify into a black hole, the Sun needs to be compressed to the size of a small city (and in doing so will have a density of about one Himalayan range per cubic meter), and you can fill in your gaps. While a smaller black hole is super dense, the bigger the black holes get, the less dense they are.

Why Do Black Holes Exist?

Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, has a mass of 4 million suns, and weighs 6 blue whales per cubic meter- much smaller than the Black hole compressed out of the Sun. The ultramassive black hole IRAS 20100−4156, which is as wide as the Solar System and is equivalent to the mass of almost 4 billion suns, is only as dense as air. And if we are to have much bigger big black hole, say the size of the observable universe, it can be even lighter.

Scientists even claim that “that if you take a gigantic balloon and fill it with undecillions of tons of air, the moment it gets to the size of a solar system, an event horizon suddenly forms and it turns into a supermassive black hole. Without violence or squeezing.” This makes the creation of Black Holes rather easy? And one can rightfully ask, “Can there be a Black Hole Universe”, a terrifying monster that is greater than the size of the universe we observe?

A Universe-Sized Black Hole

The observable universe is 45 billion light-years across and has a mass of about a million billion billion suns. It includes with hundreds of billions of galaxies, interstellar gas, and vast stretches of nothingness. [There is good science that reveals that the vast stretches of “nothingness” in the intergalactic and interstellar space is full of particle-antiparticle pairs- something that is integral to Hawking Radiation.]

10 Common Misconceptions About Black Holes

Although the universe is replete with stars. The number two hundred billion trillion stars is often thrown out, and to put it into perspective, this number is greater than the aggregate of sand grains on the Earth. Despite this immensity, the universe is not very dense: it has an average density of about 5 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter. With all the mass in the observable universe, we can, albeit theoretically, create a black hole that is ten times larger than the observable universe.

If we are to take the ideas of “black hole cosmology” to support the idea that we’re living inside a black hole, the Black Hole Universe that we are a part of is ten times bigger than we imagine: a cosmic-sized black hole. [One also has to note that Carl Sagan defined cosmos to be everything that exists, has existed, or will exist].

Book Review of Cosmos by Carl Sagan: A Most Brilliant Book

However, scientists posit that it would be impossible to reconcile the idea of an “expanding universe” with “a universe inside a black hole“. So we can rule out the speculation that the observable universe is a black hole. But there might be an exception.

Image:Skyway and User:Booyabazooka | Wikimedia Commons

A Whole Universe Born Inside a Black Hole

All Black holes house a singularity – a point where, as NASA puts it, “matter is crushed to infinite density“. NASA also says that the singularity may either be “a physical structure or a purely mathematical one, but right now astronomers don’t know which is true. The prediction of a singularity may signal the limits of relativity“. It is often said that black holes warp the universe so much that, at the event horizon, space and time switch their roles. The implication being that space would go on forever (inside a black hole) but time would be finite.

Once inside a black hole, one would also notice the stretch of space in one direction and the shrinkage in all other directions – more or less like a collapsing spaghetti. [Sphagettification is also a term used to refer to a type of death encountered in a black hole. You can read our guide below for greater detail]:

10 Common Misconceptions About Black Holes

It is a matter of time before the whole black hole universe collapses into itself as it turns into a singularity. Marie Howe, one of the great poets of our time, paid tribute to Stephen Hawking with her astonishing human-centered take on “singularity“:

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?

One of the implications of Marie’s poems is that singularity is an event in time- something that is attested by modern science. Here are a few astonishing points about singularities, though:

The singularity of a black hole is not at its center or in any direction at all.
Singularity is in the future of whatever falls inside.

When all of matter inevitably collapses into a infinitely small region with infinite gravity and infinite energy, it might be the end of it all. Or, maybe not.

The Cycles of Black Holes and the Cycles of Time

This scenario of the collapse of the black hole universe into a singularity (described above) is known as The Big Crunch. But the Big Crunch might be followed by a Big Bounce – a rebounder, an expander of space, giving rise to the possibility of a new universe being born inside a black hole. Nothing changes for an observer outside the Black Hole, though. For the observer, it is just as it alwaays was: a sphere of nothingness.

So maybe the idea of our universe being inside a black hole might not be too far of a stretch. Imagination has it that our black hole universe might be a subset of a parent universe, which itself is a black hole inside another universe. And this could stretch to ad infinitum? In such a case, is there anything like the original universe- the progenitor of a black hole universes? Or was it, as the remainder of Marie Howe’s poem that we quoted above?

“There was no   Nature.    No
them.   No tests

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing”

Infinite Black Hole Universes

Image: D. V. Smitherman, MSFC | Wikimedia Commons

If it were true that the cycle of a universe begetting black holes that leads to another universe that houses a black hole, and so on, would seem like a giant cosmic self-reproduction. Universes created this way would be subject to natural selection. If universes are begotten by black holes, the universes that don’t lead to the creation of black holes would die out in the long run, posit some scientists.

“The universes with the conditions for loads of black holes would become the most common and spawn the most daughter universes. Survival of the fittest, but with universes instead of organisms. The capability of an universe to produce black holes becomes increasingly common in later generations, as universes that generate many black holes spawn many universes and pass on physics similar to their own to those universes, making the daughter universes more likely to create many black holes.”

Different universes would have fundamental values higher or lower but there would be some preference towards creation of universes with fundamental values that would lead to the creation of black holes. As the observable universe as we know it has 10¹⁷ black holes, we might be able to say that it was born after an arduous process of cosmological selection that favored the production of such an extraordinary number of black holes. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, who was one of the early proponets of natural selection applied to the scale of the universe sheds greater light on the idea:

“The idea is that the universe evolved in a way which is very analogous to natural selection in a population, say, of bacteria. To do this the universe needs to reproduce itself, and I took over an older idea by John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt, who were pioneers of quantum gravity. Their idea was that black holes become the seeds of the birth of new universes….John Wheeler had already speculated that when this happens, the laws of nature are reborn again, in the new baby universe; he called it reprocessing the universe.”

Whether these ideas fall merely into the realms of mere imagination or can be tested out by observation and evidence is something we do not know. Yet. It would take a staggering scientific imagination, perhaps much more powerful than the idea of infinite black hole universes themselves.

A Universe-Sized Black Hole

A Whole Universe Born Inside a Black Hole

The Cycles of Black Holes and the Cycles of Time

Infinite Black Hole Universes

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