OLD ART:  THE GALACTIC CITY - PART 5More from the old comic I sketched in middle school, “The Galact

OLD ART:  THE GALACTIC CITY - PART 5More from the old comic I sketched in middle school, “The Galactic City.” Previously The Great Annhilator blew up his own apartment with his own spit, and here he explains it’s because he can generate antimatter.Of course since I didn’t really understand physics in those days, I attributed this to him having magical “antimatter glands.”In reality The Great Annihilator’s antimatter spit isn’t really unique to it, it’s a process that all black holes can use. Positron-electron pairs will naturally foam into existence in environments with a large flux of gamma rays and strong magnetic fields, such as the base of black hole jets.We then see The Great Annihilator’s backstory back when he lived in the Milky Way and was friends with the supermassive black hole there (here?), Sagitarrius A*. Of course given that this setting depicts galaxies as literal cities, the Milky Way is also depicted as a place full of buildings and streets. When the Milky Way Matter Famine starts, the stars do not allow the black holes to eat anything. This is attributed in this comic to a nebulous bigotry the stars have. However as I got older, I realized that it didn’t really make sense to depict the stars as being in the wrong here when I depicted the black hole characters as intentionally seeking out and devouring baby stars.In my current, more realistic interpretation of the whole “galaxy is a civilization of stars” setting, the divide between stars and black holes is essentially due to a misunderstanding of physics.You see, in general relativity there is something called the “no hair theorem.” Basically it states that two black holes can only be distinguished by three properties: mass, spin, and electric charge. This implies they are very simple objects, far simpler than even rocks. It gets even worse for black holes out there in space, because they’re unlikely to possess an electric charge–that leaves them with just two (!) distinguishing parameters.In essence the stars are convinced the black holes are not sentient because of the no hair theorem.But as it turns out the no hair theorem only applies to isolated black holes in equilibrium. Black holes that are actively accreting can possess different features, such as space-time asymmetries, magnetic fields, and lots of complex interactions with the matter flowing into them. In real life this doesn’t mean they’re alive, but in a setting like this one where all the celestial bodies are alive in some way, it means they can be conscious while accreting.The reason the stars never realized that is two-fold: the black holes speak a gravitational wave language the stars cannot detect well enough to view as anything other than animalistic noises, and the stars actively keep the black holes starving. In my current conception of this setting, the black holes are perfectly content to consume nonliving matter, but the stars claim all the galaxy’s dust and gas for their own use, both to build more stars and to be used as raw materials for technologies. The black holes devour stars not because they particularly want to, but because they are starving and being deprived of what they need to remain conscious beings. -- source link

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