[soup10]

Ok, but in my mind it's a lot like a mystery box, there's a lot of speculation about what's in the box, but without new instruments or new observation techniques, if the light/information from inside isn't reaching us we'll probably not be able to prove what's going on in the box one way or the other. One can claim "space-time breaks inside the mystery box" all you want, but I haven't heard of any testable theories.

[wanda]

Perhaps, but in terms of getting things done and making progress, it isn't very useful to suppose that it is simply a mystery box and that's that.

Because if we just accept that, what do we do then? We just sit and wait for some new astronomical observation to give us a clue? that could take forever, and we'd be banking that we have the tech to observe this magic hint.

Better to suppose that the theories we have comprise an accurate approximation or partial model of reality, and from there strive to find a better model.

The process of doing so will either refine/entrench our current model and our conviction, or it will result in actually finding a better model. Win-win, and all the while, we can still have our telescopes and detectors on for the magic hint we'd be sat waiting for anyway.

When things break down into singularities, it can be a pretty good indicator that we've got something wrong. Not necessarily, but in this case, I think we missed something.

[soup10]

Sure, I just think it might have a more "boring" answer than people are hoping for. E.g. behind the veil is something extremely high mass and energy, but it's more akin to a new class of Star rather than something where space, time, mass and energy lose all meaning.

[cruffle_duffle]

I mean based on the well tested theories we have now regarding general relativity… it isn’t just gonna be a new class of star. Unless general relativity is flat wrong, which it isn’t. That isn’t to say general relativity is the end all of our understanding of the universe—black holes are a perfect demonstration of where our understanding breaks down completely. Clearly there is a lot more going on than we currently can explain.

For it to just be a super dense “new class of star” would first require you to explain why general relativity is completely wrong.

And that is the problem. Black holes are weird because they break the well tested equations we currently use to describe what we observe in the universe.

If you want my opinion, figuring this shit out (including what we are calling “dark matter”) is gonna unlock a whole new realm of cool stuff for humanity. I suspect there is a reason why we haven’t solved the Fermi paradox and it is because most “intelligent life”, as we imagine it, is living outside our current understanding of the universe. To get into the “cool aliens club”, our understanding of the universe will need to change.