A-Twitchy-Ship

“Today, we celebrate an important victory: Wendy and Diana are finally free. We extend our deepest gratitude to everyone who stood in solidarity, raised their voices, advocated, and supported Wendy and Diana throughout this journey. Your unwavering support made a difference,” SMUG said in a post on X.

The problem is that the black hole has mega gravity, so my first concern is that it's gonna grab onto the Really Long Stick (RLS) and start schlorping that thang into its wretched gullet, and then whatever the RLS is attached to (e.g. hands, maybe with a lil wrist lanyard so you don't drop it; spaceship; a planet) will also be schlorped toward the black hole even if it had previously been a safe distance away. It's like when you have your dog on a leash and he starts dragging you towards a mud puddle. If you're standing still, it's way easier for him to yank you off balance and into the mud puddle.

However, if you're jogging past, then your momentum helps overcome his yanking and you go away mud-free. So we can't be hovering in space for this and slowly extending the RLS towards the black hole. My suggestion is that we attach the RLS to the bottom of the spaceship, pointing downwards, so that we look like a lollipop, and then we start a good distance away and go to faster-than-light speeds (light cannot escape a black hole, but *faster* than light maybe can) (suddenly i'm worried about whether WE turn into a black hole every time we're going FTL but that's a problem for another time). Point is, we angle our trajectory so the end of the stick dips into the black hole as we nyoom past.

I posit that one of three things will happen: 1. We will be slingshotted around the black hole because the gravity well still has enough force to curve our trajectory before we get out of it. As for the RLS, it: a) realistically probably breaks, or b) gets stretched like taffy so now we have an Even Really Longer Stick

2. Have you ever seen one of those coin whirl machines? This thing? This is what would normally happen if something heading past the black hole got too close to the gravity well to escape -- it spirals faster and faster the closer you get to the center, because the pull of gravity gets stronger. If matter traveling FTL cannot escape a black hole's gravity well, this will still happen to us, but it will happen at light speed as soon as our stick touches the event horizon. Because that's how fast we are already going. :))))))))

Really Long Stick into a black hole is an extremely fun game and let me tell you astrophysicists love to play mental games. Yes black holes do have heck of large gravity, but they don’t do much schlorping.

I’m going to assume several things here, the first of which is that by “into” the black hole we mean “past the event horizon” which is the point at which light cannot escape.

While in principle if you get close enough to poke at a black hole you should also be falling into it, I’m also assuming that we are far enough away and our stick is improbably long enough that I personally am not primarily under the influence of the black holes gravitational pull.

So in this situation your first and most immediate problem is that the force of gravity on your Black Hole Facing end of the RLS is going to be WAY stronger than the end that you’re holding onto, and so the stick will experience a stretching. Under most definitions of stick, stretch is not a thing they do very well, and so your stick will begin to fray, first by fracturing and then at an atomic level, into smaller and smaller pieces. If you’re poking a small (star sized) black hole this should happen well before you get to the event horizon. So small black holes will simply “nope” the stick before it can touch it.

Large black holes will nope the stick after they get into the black hole and so pulling this stick back out (good luck) will give you a shredded, slightly less Really Long stick.

If you want to nyoom your way around the black hole while you do this, you sure can, but you have a momentum problem with the twisting motion of the stick now and the easiest thing is to just smash the stick into the side of the black hole (this will also fracture the stick and then shred the fractured bits into finest powder).

Probably the most fun you can have with a black hole is, instead of Poke with Stick, throw some gas at it. Not only is gas something that can’t get shredded (it already has no structural integrity), you can watch it do the doomed coin spiral from a distance. AND. As the gas spirals in, it will heat up to a ridiculous temperature and start to glow with visible light. (and x rays. Free scan of every single bone you have. Medical or astrophysical doctors do not recommend standing nearby.)

I imagine Garak had to quit during exile, because otherwise the smell would stick to his clothes, and you can't have the tailor smelling like that.

Ziyal would NEVER, she had too many adults breathing down her neck and if they'd caught the slightest whiff of it on her they'd have been furious.