Spaghetti

I was listening to this one astronomer type guy, I think it was just a clip on youtube so I don't remember who it was or what the video was called, but he was talking about what would happen if the world fell into a blackhole. He was expounding on his opinion that it would be a fantastically painful experience.

According to him as you near the center of the blackhole you would move progressively faster and faster. That is all well and good, but a black hole being the massive gravitational object that it is, he argued that as you fall closer and closer to the center even tiny differences in distance make a huge difference. Thus it would be that if you were falling feet first your feet would begin traveling faster than your head. Obviously that is not a good thing.

He then theorized that eventually your body would be ripped apart into segments as they were strained to the breaking point by the gravity of the blackhole. He goes further to say that even after your body has begun falling in pieces you still have the moment were the gravity is so strong it begins to snap the bonds holding the atoms of your body together. Literally eating you on the atomic level.

Here is my issue with this: in this talk the speaker seems to assume that you are conscious throughout this entire experience, or at least until the point were you have been atomically disassembled. Let us examine this.

So you're falling feet first. Your body begins to be ripped into segments. Eventually all you are is a falling head as it would be fairly tough to rip a head apart, it being a pretty solid mass. The blood will be sucked down and out, which is assuming the soft brain tissue isn't collapsing under either the force of the super acceleration or the pressure of the every increasing atmosphere, or incinerated by its passage through said atmosphere, or that your brain is sucked out of your skull along with the blood.

No, let us assume the brain stays in the skull and that even with the blood getting sucked out not all of it manages to get out. With some leftovers of blood I suppose thought would still be technically possible, even without a body. And while you wouldn't last long, you really wouldn't need to, at such a rate of fall and with such gravity time would distort and an instant would take a good long while. The thing is, with everything slowed down because of your speed would you be able to perceive it as an instant? Even if it took a lifetime would it pass it you as a mere flicker of time?

My thinking here is that it all comes down to biology. The brain will not function without blood, or at least not for long. So without the blood supplying the brain there is no thought and therefore no pain. The counter point being that in a black hole you don't have to live very long, things are going to be moving along rather briskly. In the end I suppose it comes down to how long it takes for a neuron to fire and transmit the message of pain.

Also in arguing for one not being conscious of their own demise in a black hole, while only one factor need go wrong for the victim to be rendered unconscious, every factor need go right to sustain it, which puts the odds heavily in favor of unconsciousness.

I am vaguely conscious here that I may be injecting myself into a conversation that has been underway for some time and may have already arrived at a consensus. Nevertheless I persist.