date: 2020-06-07
subject: Fuzzy black hole solar system

Fuzzy black hole solar system - 2020-06-07 - TOGoS's Journal

I had a dream that I was visiting a planet that orbited a black hole. There was a small star in the solar system, too, also orbiting the black hole, and a smaller planet farther away. My first thought was "they probably don't get enough light from that black hole", but maybe that's what the star was for.

To visit, you'd land on the farther-out planet, and then there was another rocket that would take you down to the bigger, closer one, which had a cool name like "Terrazon" (it almost definitely started with "Terra") and whose contintents had 90-degree corners. Or as close as you could have to 90-degree corners on a sphere. When I visualized the solar system from 'above', the space ship that took you 'down' to Terrazon (which was a shiny cigar-shaped thing with fins at the bottom, like in cheesy old sci-fi) did almost the entire trip firing rockets in reverse, maintaining a constant velocity. Which meant that it would use the same amount of fuel going either direction, right? (no, it doesn't.)

Down on Terazon they were having some kind of festival along the shore of a lake. The black hole appeared several degrees across in the sky. Some scientist who had something to do with me being there told me that it was a "fuzzy" black hole, which made it sound less dangerous, though I didn't know what that meant, and I wondered if it actually was any less dangerous than a non-fuzzy one. Maybe that the event horizon wasn't well-defined.

Somehow the gravitational pull between the two planets and the star didn't throw the whole system into chaos, even though their orbits were pretty close together (they appeared close together in my visualization, and that the trip between the two planets seemed like a short ride backs that up).

Towards the end of the dream I was doing the downward trip between the two planets again, except I was driving on the beltline in my Geo. The right door started shaking apart (an alarm started going off to warn me that the car was having severe structural problems), and I held it together by putting my hand on the bottom of the open window and squeezing the 2 sides of the door together while pulling inwards until I got off the beltline and pulled over somewhere, and then said "well maybe that's the end of that car."