Data is Beautiful

Or if we divorced ourselves from biological life!

It's not totally settled that practical FTL is actually impossible. There's possibly loopholes that can potentially be exploited, such as the Alcubierre drive that attempts to to shrink spacetime in front of it while expanding spacetime behind it. So while it itself moves at a slower speed, it traverses through an artificially shortened distance basically.

It's all still sci fi at this point of course, and probably isn't practical due to enormous energy requirements. (like, you'd basically need a star or something to power it as far as we know) But, we're still pretty far from understanding what dark energy is, so things could potentially change at some point in the future. shrug

No reason not to let the kids dream though, they may be the ones studying these things in the future.

You must be fun at parties.

Yeah. Technically you aren't screwed unless you are in an orbit that crosses the event horizon.

Although I wonder if the accretion disk produces enough drag that an orbit could eventually fall into the black hole.

Also, time gets funky when you get closer and closer to the black hole.

But in any case the behavior is the same. It's just a lot bigger.

He's probably talking about tidal forces. Gravity falls off with the square of distance, so the closer you get to the center, the greater the difference in gravitational strength becomes for every meter of distance. With a supermassive, you're far enough from the center that your head and feet experience similar levels of gravity at the event horizon.

With a small one you're much closer to the center, so your head and feet experience extremely different gravity, which rips you apart.

Stars in other stellar systems are called stars. There's only one star in the universe named the Sun, and its system is the only Solar System in the universe. The same is true for solar wind (vs. stellar wind), solar mass, solar day, solar radius, etc. — all of these terms refer to Sol, a.k.a. the Sun.