Origin of the Borg

[Citin]

Spoiler: The Borg Queen was a changeling

[Shandi]

My thoughts are simple. The borg are simply too cool to be questioned. Also, Voyager ruled! Resistance to these facts is futile.

[Wraith]

What is your avatar?

[zombine]

Speaking of "First Contact", they mentioned in the movie that the Borg existed in that time frame, but just in the Delta Quadrant (probably a call-back to Q-who).

Wasn't the whole point of first contact that the future borg on the enterprise were trying to contact the present borg in the D-quad?

my theory as to the borg is similar to this

[Shandi]

What is your avatar?

My avatar? My avatar is myself and Tamara playing upside down at Desert Bus for Hope, with a PS3. Someone was clever enough to label the photo as well.

[Wraith]

Ah. It's way too big a picture to be shrunk that much. I can't make anything else.

[Alja-Markir]

Anyone who says a blackhole can take you somewhere is in denial.

Yes indeed. Even Stephen Hawking has finally had to admit that.

Imagine sending a heat proof object into the Sun. It doesn't burn, but the further in it goes, the greater the pressures that press down upon it. The sun can fit a million Earths inside, so at the center of the sun the pressure is so immense as to be quite hard to imagine. The object would be crushed and dispersed, literally torn apart atom by atom from the forces at work there.

Black holes are the exact same thing as the Sun, except a lot more dense. Why are they black? Not because they suck light into another dimension or anything, but because the gravitational forces pull light in and, were light crushable, the forces would crush it too. Significantly past the event horizon, I'd imagine it would be very bright from the sheer amount of trapped electromagnetic energy.

Or so I understand it. I'm no Stephen Hawking though, so I could be quite wrong in certain ways.

~Alja~

[Wraith]

Anyone who says a blackhole can take you somewhere is in denial.

Yes indeed. Even Stephen Hawking has finally had to admit that.

Imagine sending a heat proof object into the Sun. It doesn't burn, but the further in it goes, the greater the pressures that press down upon it. The sun can fit a million Earths inside, so at the center of the sun the pressure is so immense as to be quite hard to imagine. The object would be crushed and dispersed, literally torn apart atom by atom from the forces at work there.

Black holes are the exact same thing as the Sun, except a lot more dense. Why are they black? Not because they suck light into another dimension or anything, but because the gravitational forces pull light in and, were light crushable, the forces would crush it too. Significantly past the event horizon, I'd imagine it would be very bright from the sheer amount of trapped electromagnetic energy.

Or so I understand it. I'm no Stephen Hawking though, so I could be quite wrong in certain ways.

~Alja~

...or so the Germans would have us believe...

[The Hitman]

I'm under the impression there's more to it than that, actually.

Crusher or someone could probably answer this a lot better than I can (as I am not a physicist, even though I play one on TV), but I believe the whole 'black hole as wormhole' thing is due to some solution to GR equations which has never been observed in nature. Basically, it's sort of possible as part of the model for black holes, as I understand it, but it doesn't seem to me like it's really 'science,' per se.

[Graham]

Speaking of "First Contact", they mentioned in the movie that the Borg existed in that time frame, but just in the Delta Quadrant (probably a call-back to Q-who).

Wasn't the whole point of first contact that the future borg on the enterprise were trying to contact the present borg in the D-quad?

That is indeed what happens in First Contact, or, The Only Good Next-Gen Movie.

Seriously Paramount, you ruined the system. There was a system in place for which Star Trek movies are good and which ones blow. Then you come along with your "Nemesis" and bugger the whole thing up.

"Brent Spiner got all fat so we'll have him spend half the movie in a coverall... it's BRILLIANT!"

[The Hitman]

Are you talking about the Star Trek parity rules?

[Misty]

"Brent Spiner got all fat so we'll have him spend half the movie in a coverall... it's BRILLIANT!"

[Lord Chrusher]

Alja-Markir: Talking about extreme pressure in the sun then talking about black holes is some what misleading. The Sun and black holes are widely different objects. True solid matter can not exist in the sun as it would ionized by the intense heat and pressure but it would be vaporized rather than torn apart. On the other hand the tidal forces caused by the intense gravitational field of a black hole would literally tear you apart. If you could survive past the event horizon you could see light that arrived after you behind you as you fall into the singularity but you could not see the singularity itself.

While a wormhole is a solution to Einstein's field equations no process exists to create it not would it be stable even if you could survive approaching a back hole. Any matter passing through such a hole would cause it to collapse. However this does not prevent a wormhole from existing - the wormhole could not be black hole based. Such a black hole would require some way of producing antigravity to keep it open.

[Alja-Markir]

Good info, Crusher. Thanks!

Although isn't a black hole just a super condensed star? I know they lack sufficient nuclear fussion to overcome their own condensed gravities, but I was under the impression that the pressures would be identicle.

Remember I posited a heat-proof object, simply because I don't know enough about the thermal qualities of black holes. I wanted to take heat out of the equation. So yeah, normally things would vaporize, but heat-proof things would be torn apart. I kinda over simplified it.

~Alja~

[Lord Chrusher]

Yes a black hole is a collapsed star, a star where there is insignificant pressure to resist gravitational collapse. There is no pressure in or around a black hole since there is nothing to press while the concept of pressure like most physical concepts breaks down at the singularity at the center of the black hole. Black holes are some of the coldest objects in the universe with effective temperatures due to Hawking radiation only a small fraction above absolute zero.

[The Pious Flea]

Yes a black hole is a collapsed star

No, it's merely a mass sufficiently dense that the escape velocity within a certain radius of the center is greater than or equal to the speed of light. They can be produced in ways other than the collapse of a star, although the majority of black holes produced after the earliest stages of the universe will be of that type.

[Lord Chrusher]

Ok, many black holes are collapsed stars. However primordial black holes are caused by the same process as those formed from the remains of super giant stars, by the collapse of matter to with in its Schwarzschild radius (the radius of the event horizon of the resulting black hole).

We are both right Flea.

[The Pious Flea]

We are both right Flea.

You can also make them pop out of the vacuum if you have enough available energy.

[The Hitman]

Forgive my ignorance, but don't you still need the mass or energy equivalent of a star to do that?

[The Pious Flea]

Forgive my ignorance, but don't you still need the mass or energy equivalent of a star to do that?

Black holes generated from the collapse of stars have a minimum mass. If the star doesn't have that much mass, it can't generate the forces required to squeeze matter into a singularity.

But black holes can be much less massive than that - either because they've lost mass through Hawking radiation, or because they were generated that way.

A very, very small black hole could be produced with a relatively small amount of energy. The smaller they are, the quicker they radiate away their mass, but if it were large enough to begin absorbing matter, it could stabilize and grow.

This is generally regarded as a bad thing.

[Alja-Markir]

But wait, if they have such small masses, what introduces such a strong gravitational force? Or am I confused?

I was under the impression that while the average supernova-made black hole is significantly less massive than the star that birthed it, it still is incredibly massive, much more so than most planets or whatnot. Am I correct in my understanding that, most black holes have fairly large event horizons because they have so much gravity, because they contain so much mass?

~Alja~

[The Hitman]

I bet a physics student would be able to give us a better perspective than Wikipedia.

Hint hint.

[Citin]

I bet a physics student would be able to give us a better perspective than Wikipedia.

Hint hint.

I think that if we all just listened to Chrusher we'd all be a lot happier, he does have far more schooling on these phenomenon then the rest of us put together

[The Hitman]

Yeah, I was hoping he would chime at that point in with some wisdom on tiny black holes.

If it turns out they are real, I could definitely see a 'Black Hole Kids' cartoon show in the making. Think of the merchandising!

[Lord Chrusher]

I have been reading this thread but I have not had time to sit down and talk about it.

Let us consider a 1 kg black hole that was created as the Pious Flea suggested from vacuum energy. The local energy density required is extreme to say the least - 6.6*10^96 J/m^3 (This is roughly the density of the universe 10^-44 s after the Big Bang). This black hole would have a radius of 1.48*10^-27 m, roughly a trillion times smaller than a proton and would have a lifetime of 8.7*10^-17 s. Even if every particle in the neighbourhood of the micro black hole fell in at the speed of light, only particles within 2.61e-8 m of the black hole would reach the event horizon before the black hole evaporated. This is an upper limit for several reasons including that since it takes time for the effect of the black holes gravity to reach surrounding particles and since the surrounding particles would not directly fall in and would do so at a speed less than the speed of light. If our black hole was in water, less than 7*10^-20 kilograms of mass would be swollowed before the black hole evaporated. Even if this black hole was created inside a neutron star (the most dense known objects - more than a trillion times denser than water) less than ten micrograms would fall in the black hole, too little to have any effect on the lifetime of the black hole.

Black holes like this one and smaller do not last long enough to grow - the smaller they are the much faster they decay. Do not worry, the LHC is not going to create any black holes that will swallow the earth or even large chunks of the detectors. A one kilogram black hole is twenty orders of magnitude larger than what could impossible be created in the LHC. There is no way in the current universe to create such black holes.