WATCH THIS: Why it’s best not to fall into a black hole

Alan Martin December 23, 2015

Black holes are pretty tough nuts to understand. At the time of writing, there are 13,415 words on the black hole Wikipedia page, and with the average adult read time of 275 words per minute, you’ll be there for almost an hour – assuming you don’t need to re-read any sections.

If you don’t have that kind of time, then this six-minute animation from Kurzgesagt is a good place to start for a quick overview of black holes, and what makes them so fascinating.

After covering the basics of what a black hole is, the video turns to what would theoretically happen if you or I were to fall into a black hole, around 2:20 in. There are two options here, the video posits: a quick death or a very quick death.

Although on paper there doesn’t sound a huge amount of difference between those, should you ever find yourself heading towards a black hole, you’d definitely want the latter option. The former involves gravity crushing your cells at several million times the force it acts with on Earth, as “your body stretches more and more until you’re a hot stream of plasma one atom wide,” while the latter would “just” see you “terminated in an instant”.

All in all, it makes me suddenly cheery that I’m pretty much guaranteed to die on Earth.