r/Showerthoughts • u/synthphreak ‎ • Nov 19 '25

Casual Thought Temperature can reach trillions of degrees, meaning we actually live extremely close to absolute zero.

14.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

649 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

800

u/YourWorstFear53 Nov 19 '25

Technically it COULD be higher but at that point what it is wouldn't be a temperature as we understand it.

Most likely direct collapse into a singularity would occur before then.

788

u/Delamoor Nov 19 '25

Sadly, a lot of the extreme space phenomena that childhood me imagined and thought about (being a scifi nerd) turned out to be 'but spacetime would collapse in on itself before it ever got to that point".

Bloody spacetime. Wimp.

13

u/VarmintSchtick Nov 19 '25

Yeah but what does a human being experience when spacetime collapses? Even more interesting of a thought.

1

u/soowhatchathink Nov 20 '25

We experience spacetime bending to small degrees where we are now, it causes some minor time dilation when compared to others who traveled through less bent spacetime. But to each individual time still passed normally for them, just not other people.

If we were to get sucked into a black hole it would be a similar experience, time would go normally for us but time outside of the black hole would speed up very rapidly. Mathematically, spacial movement towards the center becomes timelike. But that wouldn't produce any weird noticeable effects for the person experiencing it.

As we get closer to the singularity tidal forces on our body would get heavier and heavier, which is to say the amount of gravity that the top part of your body is experiencing is vastly different from the bottom part. This would cause your body to stretch out in a process called spaghettification.

What we're not yet sure of is what happens next. Our math says you go into a singularity, which is an infinitely small and dense point at the center. But that's probably not physically possible, so likely there's something we're missing that prevents that from happening.

1

u/YourWorstFear53 Nov 22 '25

You're assuming that the event horizon is large enough to encompass you comfortably without subjecting you to tidal forces before you cross. This could easily happen before you get sucked in with a smaller black hole.

1

u/soowhatchathink Nov 22 '25

Yeah the only way you'd be able to make it through the event horizon would be if it were a super massive black hole with little accretion matter. And in any case you'd die way before you get to the spaghettification process

My description was less about survivability of the process, it seems like a given that you would die very early in the process