I'm not an astrophysicist, but that ends up being the weird perception thing about them, right? Mostly they're like a star of the same mass, and then a few will get really big and be at the center of a galaxy, but the perception is that of a natural disaster.

Big ball of plasma in the center of the solar system that will definitely eventually explode and wipe out anything left alive on any surrounding planet? NBD. An object of the same mass but it's smaller so it doesn't shine? People picture it as being more immediately violent for some reason because the "light can't escape" thing sounds so wild.

Tell me you don't understand black holes using a lot of words.

As far as gravity goes they are equivalent to the star that they collapsed from and just as deadly.

The difference is that you can get that much closer before "impacting" with it, but you and superman would be fucked pretty much at the same distance from it.

And I think you need a lot less than 300 writers to conjure an idea that leverage our fantasy in more and better ways.

My understanding is that the singularity is not proven to exist and many physicists believe it is an artifact of our incorrect understanding of the physics involved.

"marauding black death wrapped in a spherical gradient of tortured space time" is a great title for a progressive rock or technical death metal song

Why is nobody talking about how

marauding black death wrapped in a spherical gradient of tortured spacetime

is such a fucking cool sentence

I suppose cosmic horror elder gods like Cthulhu and such are not all that far removed from the idea of a black hole. Particularly the ones that are less involved with Earth than Cthulhu is. Nobody is ramming a black hole with a fishing boat. But the early writing on them was done at about the same time as a lot of the foundational theoretical work on black holes (not the earliest stuff but I can believe that the writers didn't know about it)

Teachers: You can't divide by zero.
Nature: Hey guys, check this shit out.

Now get this: some scientists think black holes might have hair.

Keep in mind that all the cliches about black holes are about non-rotating black holes, which don't exist in reality. In reality, a spinning black hole has a ring singularity, not a point, and behaves much weirder and even less intuitively than the hypothetical non-rotating counterpart as it smears out spacetime into taffy.

Just FYI Superman has survived a black hole because the plot demanded it.

Our hopes and expectations == Black holes and revelations.

graph function singularities exist as physical features in our world

Do they, though..?

As I (mis?)understand it, as a massive star begins to collapse, getting denser and denser, the gravitational gradient gets steeper and steeper... and time (from the perspective of an outside observer) gets slower and slower... to the point that, from our point of view, the full collapse (or maybe even any collapse below the Schwarzschild radius?) hasn't happened yet, and won't happen until the extremely distant future, beyond the end of the universe...

So, in that sense, from the point of view of "our world", no singularities (except possibly the big bang) would ever exist (yet), all of them being censored not only by event horizons, but by being shoved into the perpetually far future, beyond time itself...

And, speaking about event horizons, isn't the whole "light isn't fast enough to escape" concept a misinterpretation of sorts..? As I (again mis?)understand it, it's not a matter of speed, but of geometry... The way space-time is twisted in such a gravitational gradient, once you get past the event horizon there are no longer any directions pointing towards the outside.

Which is another from of cosmic censorship (or a different effect or interpretation of the above), preventing anything inside the event horizon from causally interacting with the outside universe...

So, if these singularities are hidden beyond sight, causally, visually, and geometrically isolated from the rest of the universe, and perpetually shoved into the far future... can they really be said to exist in our world..?

(Of course there's always the big bang, but we can't really observe that one, only its effects, and it's not necessarily exactly what the original post was talking about anyway...)

The CW flash can escape from a black hole

Idk, I don't think most scifi pushes the envelope of what we can imagine, rather it provides a convenient escape to galaxies less incomprehensible than the bewilderment of earth where the author can make a point about spacewar and unstoppable mindless empires.

shrugs

Scifi (like any other genre) needs to continually reaffirm its association with creativity, not assume because paper thin character types are fighting spacewars for feudal empires and space corporations that it counts as pushing the envelope of our imaginations.

/end side rant