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rfmcdonaldI've seen this news cited multiple places, but I'll reference Alasdair Wilkins' io9 post.
Vyacheslav I. Dokuchaev's paper "Is there life inside black holes?" suggests, to be sure, that the civilization inside a black hole would be immensely advaned, a type III that makes use of all of the energy produced by a galaxy. (We Terrans are less than a type I, not even mastering our own world.) The orbits described in the paper are quite complex, not ellipses or near-circles but veritable rosettas focused on that dire mysterious singularity. No one, so far as I know, has even tried to calculate the habitable zone for a black hole's singularity, or any kind of gravitational singularity in fact. He does suggest that the supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies, like Sagittarius A* in the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy, may be more hospitable than smaller stellar-mass black holes like Cygnus X-1. Shades of Frederik Pohl's Heechee in all this.
Black holes have a well-deserved reputation for being cosmic destroyers, ripping apart anything that comes into contact with their intense gravitational forces. But a radical new theory says advanced intelligent life could live on planets inside black holes.
Professor Vyacheslav Dokuchaev of Moscow's Russian Academy of Sciences came up with this strange idea, which builds on the earlier idea that photon particles could theoretically maintain stable orbits inside black holes. He's made the rather huge leap to saying that entire planets could possible also attain stable orbit around the singularity, which is the central part of the black hole where all the laws of physics begin to break down.
Dokuchaev suggests that these planets would not have conventional orbits around the singularity, but rather orbit around it in a complex spiral pattern. The singularity and other trapped photons would provide the planet with light and warmth, potentially allowing life to evolve. Oh yes, Dokuchaev is going all-in with this idea:
"This planet might even support a complex chemistry rich enough to allow life to evolve. Advanced civilizations may live safely inside the black hole without being visible from the outside."
Indeed, if such planets do exist, there's absolutely no way we could ever know. They would be inside the event horizon of the black hole, meaning you would have to travel faster than light to escape, which remains completely impossible under our current understanding of physics.
That's hardly the only problem with the idea - Dokuchaev himself admits gravity would still exert massive tidal forces, and trapped photons would bring with them massive energy densities. An advanced civilization might be able to deal with these issues, but it's unclear whether such a species could ever evolve under such conditions. There's also the tiny problem of causality itself breaking down, as the singularity itself represents a point where the laws of physics break down.
Vyacheslav I. Dokuchaev's paper "Is there life inside black holes?" suggests, to be sure, that the civilization inside a black hole would be immensely advaned, a type III that makes use of all of the energy produced by a galaxy. (We Terrans are less than a type I, not even mastering our own world.) The orbits described in the paper are quite complex, not ellipses or near-circles but veritable rosettas focused on that dire mysterious singularity. No one, so far as I know, has even tried to calculate the habitable zone for a black hole's singularity, or any kind of gravitational singularity in fact. He does suggest that the supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies, like Sagittarius A* in the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy, may be more hospitable than smaller stellar-mass black holes like Cygnus X-1. Shades of Frederik Pohl's Heechee in all this.
