well?

I took a physics course at a community college over 20 years ago and one of the things that stood out to me was the professor telling us not to overthink or assign too much romanticism to the idea of black holes.

His message was basically “it just means the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light… if you plug the size and mass of the universe into the escape velocity formula, the result you get back is greater than the speed of light, so our entire universe is a black hole.”

If this was being discussed at a community college decades ago then I think the new discoveries aren’t as revelatory as they would at first appear to the general public.

Nah really it was probably some small thing the media got a hold of and just ran with. I think you're spot on
- Relevant xkcd
  And a relevant smbc for good measure.
- On the contrary; while I have heard the explanation that the commenter you replied to has said I have also heard a slightly different theory:
  Our universe is the 3 dimensional event horizon of a 4th dimensional black hole. By extension we may find that black holes in our universe have similar funky 2 dimensional areas at their even horizons.
  I am sure clickbait articles are part of it but there also seems to be several actual theories surrounding the idea of the nature of our universe relating to black holes.
Scientist: Scientific discoveries are meaningless when taken out of context.
Journalist: Scientific discoveries are meaningless.
- Journalist: What is context?
another thing I learned at some point: Just because a physics formula returns a result, doesn't mean that it's reality
- TBF black holes themselves were originally just the result of a Physics formula, but they eventually turned out to be a "reality". Sometimes that shit happens, yo.
- Iff the rules of physics are accurate then it does, but we don't know that they are. In fact, we're pretty sure we're missing some things. See: The Crisis in Cosmology.
Orr, you’re missing the obvious alternative here - the guy was a legendary level scientist, but the government stole his research and threatened his family and sidelined him into being a community college professor so that no one pays attention to his “drivel” so that they continue to control us into being workers for the capitalist pigs
- I mean, the model was first developed in the 70s so maybe not that specific guy
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology
Theory is one thing.
Observation is the next step.
- Absolutely. I don’t want to minimize the importance of the new discoveries in any way; I’m just saying this isn’t the great surprise the original post seems to think it is.
Interestingly, galaxies at the edge of our ability to perceive are in fact receding away from us at velocities greater than the speed of light.
- Maybe it’s because they are outside the black hole and aren’t time dilated.
When I first saw pictures of galaxies as a kid I noticed they all looked like black holes.
In a way we're all just bits of organic matter mid-flush, waiting for the Drainpipe of Destiny
- In a way we're all just bits of organic matter mid-flush, waiting for the Drainpipe of Destiny
  Word

Okay, so now you can barely afford your rent inside a black hole. Enjoy the enhanced granularity of your desperation!

That would explain why it feels like my bank account is being sucked dry.
- What is this black hole, my ex-wife?
  tugs collar
And since you're in a black hole with your unaffordable rent, you can't escape it!!!
- Evict horizon

I can barely afford rent!

Well... the good news is you can stretch your income a bit further with spaghettification!

nuclear pasta is very energy dense
Beans are economical too

paying rent sometimes feels like throwing money into a black hole

The same for mortgages too really. All these people out there toting new construction and how it’s good for property values seem to forget that higher property values means 1) higher property taxes, and 2) higher priority values, for when you sell your home and need to buy a new one.
- Not to mention mortgage rates are so damn high that your mortgage payment is basically like paying rent to the bank because you're barely touching the principal on the loan
Don't worry, the money goes to paying your landlord's mortgage.

What if we're not in a black hole, but in the aftermath of a vacuum decay event?

- But is your refrigerator running?
That is literally what the current big bang theory says! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflationary_epoch?wprov=sfla1
- Look up vacuum decay. It's theoretically a thing that can rewrite spacetime at a lower energy level, and would expand out from a point in a bubble. The expanding bubble would erase and rewrite everything it touched into the lower energy level.
Well, that might suck slightly less in the long run?
- That depends. The chances of finding other life are lower. That would also make a cosmic horizon that we would never be able to see beyond. It would make us unable to find the beginning of everything.
We're inside a dust cup?

Tax breaks for the rich is the only solution

I suddenly feel something trickling down from above. Is this what they were talking about all these years? Is this a good thing? It smells bad, like really bad. Like somebody is cooking meth while they have a near fatal case of diarrhea. What am I supposed to do?
- Get hooked on meth, it'll wildly change your priorities.
  (This is a joke, please do not do this)

Ok I've been meaning to ask this in the Space community or the NoStupidQuestions community. I've seen this news circling around the past 2 weeks and have been watching videos of people talking about it.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think the gist is that astronomers discovered with the JWST that some galaxies at the end of the observable universe appear to be younger than they are supposed to be. So it kinda blows a hole in the big bang expansion where objects farther away should be older. And that somehow ties in with the theory that our universe is inside a blackhole.

It's fascinating but I don't know what to do with that information other than just be fascinated. I think it was Neil deGrasse Tyson who said "So what does this new discovery matter to us? Nothing", because us being in a blackhole doesn't change anything in the grand universal scheme of things.

I've always liked this theory, imagining the cosmos is just a series/web/tree of black holes draining into the next. Everything gets recycled eventually.
- It meshes well with my occasional feeling that reality is just circling the drain.
- actually, we are inside the dream of someone else, and that one too is again in a dream ...
- It doesn't answer where it all came from. Whatever theory or religion you choose, there's no answer to this question apart from it suddenly appeared which implies something can be created out of nothing and that creates a whole lot of new questions and possibilities.
  It's also just whitehole theory which is possible but we've never seen one and we likely should have by now.
Another big part of it is that if the big bang happened evenly then galaxies and other objects should be spinning in random directions. So far that's not what's been observed. There seems to be a preferred direction everything spins in.
- The direction the black hole "toilet" flushes as it sucks stuff in and smashes it against each other?
  Maybe there's a parallel universe called Astraliastra where the black hole flushes the other direction!
- There seems to be a preferred direction everything spins in.
  I'm sorry but i think that's just not true?
  Inside the solar system, yes, planets more or less spin around the same axis than the whole solar system does.
  But the axis of the solar system and of the whole milky way are like 63° towards each other. Source So, not the same direction at all.
Maybe the far away galaxies are just the close galaxies seen from the other side?
We also have to remember that we can only see a bounded sphere of the universe from our frame of reference.
If we were to move our observation points to elsewhere in the universe, we'll be able to see more of the universe and challenge our current theories.
The JSWT sees only what it can, and our theories about the universe can only extend as far as that evidence. Those galaxies might appear to be younger, but the science is never finished!
Probably goes without saying

so basically We're out in butt fuck no where in space and the aliens aren't coming any time soon cause they essentially live in New York City and we're in a town in Iowa that no one has ever heard of.
typical.
- Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.
- It’s entirely possible that there are no aliens in the “New York City” part of the universe.
  Dense regions of space will have much more interactions between stellar systems and may not be stable enough for life to evolve. It could be why we haven’t seen anyone else, they’re all in their own little pockets of peace.
- Being from Iowa, I take offense to that... But yes, you are correct.
- Flyover state.
But then there's the guy who added all the mass and energy of the observable universe, calculated its' Schwarzschild Radius, and came up with 13.8 billion light years.
There's also how our observable universe's Hubble Horizon acts like a black hole event horizon, the way in which even the speed of light is insufficient to escape beyond.
A lot of the math inside a black hole is eerily similar to the math of our own horizon, as traced by the age of the universe plus the speed of light.
Nah, there's been a bunch of discussion about our entire universe being inside a black hole.
https://lemmy.world/comment/18363823
- There being a "bunch of discussion" doesn't prove anything?

We should all be celebrating our good fortune, protection against a dark forest strike!

Except from aliens that are also stuck here with us
- We're not stuck in here with them. They're stuck in here with us!
Sucking us into a black hole WAS the attack.

Both are fair and valid.

Peaceful science & good housing should go hand in hand.

Anyone got a link to either nasa or a good article explaining it?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/10/big-bang-theory-is-wrong-claim-scientists/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-inside-a-black-hole/
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798?login=false
- Scientific American points to an important fact.
  "With our latest surveys, such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and Euclid, by my very rough estimation, we’ve taken pictures of somewhere around 100 million galaxies out of the two trillion or so estimated to exist in the entire observable universe.
  Shamir’s paradigm-shattering conclusion relies on 263 of them."
  They are discussing bias in the selection.
  "Unfortunately, this kind of extreme selection introduces many opportunities for bias to creep in. When we test a new idea in cosmology—indeed, in all of science—we work to make our conclusion as robust as possible. For example, if we were to change any of these filtering steps, from the selection of survey region to the threshold for deciding whether to include a galaxy in the analysis, our results should hold up or at least show a clear trend where the signal becomes stronger. But there isn’t enough information about such methodological checks in Shamir’s paper to make that judgment, which casts doubt on the validity of the conclusions."

I mean, we can talk about it for a bit, Angie, if it’d make you feel better, but that’s really about it, honestly.

Don't get me wrong, understanding the nature of the universe is valuable and noteworthy. But how would that information meaningfully impact anyone's life or change their behavior or worldview beyond a general awe at the unfathomable mysteries we already have towards space as we've understood it for centuries? Especially in a way that would ne noticeable to this person. Am I meant to stare up at the sky from 8:15 to 8:30 every other night with my mouth agap while I try to wrap my mind around the spacetime bubble we all exist on the surface of? Or can I just eat dinner?

The reason research like this exists is because we don't know what we don't know. Results like these are meant to stoke curiousity so that more research can be done.
So on and so forth until one day you have horseshoe crabs saving millions of lives. But they didn't know that would be the case when they started researching them crabs, function comes after exploration.
- For sure, not undervaluing scientific research and exploration by any means. But Angie's post seemed to be a call to action or an expectation of a greater reaction to potential findings from the general public. But A) it's honestly the first I've heard about any such news. And B) I don't think the vast majority of people would have any idea how to even process that information, let alone get excited about it or understand it's full implications, or to have any sort of reaction to it at all.
Am I meant to stare up at the sky from 8:15 to 8:30 every other night with my mouth agap while I try to wrap my mind around the spacetime bubble we all exist on the surface of?
At scale that sounds better for society than going to church. We need a little more memento mori (memento minima?) in modern life.
- Why would the universe being a black hole invalidate religion, any more than, for example, the universe being really big already does? Don't most religions focus more on some entity or entities they think made or govern the universe more than what physical processes are "used" to do that, or what the ultimate shape of the universe is? Even when a contradiction is found, it's easy enough for a religion to just say "well, that was metaphorical", or "just the limited understanding given by (insert deity here) to our ancestors" or something along those lines to make it fit.
Astronomy is critical towards understanding the foundational principles of reality. Observing the universe around us is the guide for where physics should follow
And I think most people would agree that understanding how our world works, the physics of it all, is very very useful in unforeseen ways. Cannot hope to make a circuit if you don't know how electricity works, right?
- Again, I'm not poopooing scientific endeavor. I love science. But this person seemed to be mystified that we weren't all majorly reacting to this news as if this possible fact, in itself, was life changing. For most people, it changes nothing about their day to day lives.

Considering NASA could be canceled by an ass hole, I think we have other problems.

You better start believing in compression systems you're in one

May be that's why it sucks to live here.. It's related

Man I really wish we had super fast space travel like star wars...

hasn't this been a theory for a while now? The event horizon of a black hole keeps information minus one dimension. and the theory goes that our entire universe is just at the edge or a black hole in a 4D universe

It's just black holes all the way down.

Is it not more like all the way out?
- Wait... Are we simulating black holes yet?
One has to wonder lol.
I got it! We're within a simulation of the innards of a black hole. And that is the first time I've used the word "innards". Lol

we could acknowledge it as a possibility AND work to better our um.. local frame of reference.

I mean, I think it's fair to ignore it 99% of the time. Frankly, as much as I love space science and science in general, we all should have a responsibility to solve real problems here and now. That's been my issue with a lot of science, currently - we need problem solvers rather than idle explorers.

The problem is that most of our problems aren't really science problems. Or at least the thing holding them up isn't the lack of practical applied scientists. They're political ones. We've known what we needed to do about climate change for decades but their are capitalists who stand to lose from doing anything about it, so we don't. We have plenty of housing, it's just being hoarded by people who do nothing with it but extract free money from people who are desperate to have a place to live. We have amazing medicine, but corporations are able to abuse IP laws to price gouge people who need it to live.
A scientist or engineer could come up with some amazing sci-fi tech that has the potential to save us and capitalists would find some way to make it bleed us dry.
That's not what science is, though. Science is about pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. Science isn't about having a problem and trying to find a solution -- that's engineering, which is informed by science.
Whenever you get this kind of thoughts, take a moment to also think about the maths behind your CT and MRI scans, which originated from early radio astronomy. Alas, I don't have a source for this other than it was said by an astronomy professor during a lesson for an exam I never even attempted.
- You're not wrong though, I've heard the same anecdote. But it sort of sticks by my point. It was solving problems. Radio astronomy is important, and so is someone looking at the math and the machine and saying "hey, we can do stuff that X-Rays can't with this!"