A ring-shaped lifebelt or life preserver could help you survive longer after tumbling into a black hole. But the buoy would need to have a mass of more than 12,000 trillion tonnes, equivalent to that of an asteroid 150 kilometres wide.
If you plummeted feet-first into a black hole, your feet would experience a stronger pull than your head while your sides would be mashed together. Richard Gott of Princeton University calculated that this spaghettification would take just under 0.1 seconds. That would be long enough for a pain signal to reach the brain, so he wondered…
