Did you touch my stapler?
Did you?
It's cool if you did, I just want to know. It's not like I'm going to do something dramatic.
"Like what?"
You mean aside from have an existential breakdown in the middle of newsletter by breaking the fifth wall?
(That's when you have a conversation with someone who doesn't really exist but multiverse theory says they might, so you've given up all hope of understanding subjective reality).
"Yeah."
Well, I mean, I could just steal your sandwich out of the office refrigerator.
But I'd probably just build a spaceship fast enough to get me to Sagittarius A (that's a black hole that's 1,500 lightyears away, so I'd have time to catch up on The Walking Dead on the way).
Once I was there, I'd park my spaceship at the very perfect edge of the singularity and eat a taco.
Because, here's the thing: if I've done my math correctly, the Earth will have long-since exploded in a fiery ball of solar radiation by the time I finish chewing my last delicious bite of spicy carne asada.
I mean, maybe. Perhaps only a few thousand years will pass.
Either way -- your stapler-touching behind will be long dead.
That's because time works differently around and inside a black hole.
So the moral of the story is: don't touch my $%*&ing stapler. And, also, physics is the science of revenge.
Go now, and tell people what you've seen here today.
And if you want to learn more about parking spaceships at the edge of black holes, check out this piece on Neural.
