Peace: Alive and Free
A universe of your own. Creations made from a thought. Peace, chosen Chaos, memory and return.
In development · Opens when readyLive in your browser · every ray traced
Event
Horizon
That’s a real black hole behind this text, computed as you watch. Scroll, and you fall toward it.
No account · nothing to install · WebGL2
Nine ways in.
Feed it anything, merge two holes, explore the light, build your own experiment, or journey to the last black hole. Each one explains what is calculated and what is chosen.
09 · Premiere Experience NEW
The Last Voyage
Step aboard the observation deck. Watch the black hole approach, move between windows, scroll outside to follow the ship, and stay with the observer through tidal breakup. Three-minute cinematic pacing and a real calculated trajectory.
Begin your voyage →
06 · Feed the Black Hole NEW
Feed it anything
A person, a starship, a battle station, Earth, the Sun, a red giant, a nebula, a whole galaxy. See where each one tears apart, how much is swallowed and how much escapes, and how thin the noodle really gets.
Throw something in →
07 · Black Hole Merger NEW
Hear the chirp
Two black holes spiral together and become one. Watch spacetime ripple and hear the wave, with LIGO’s real numbers.
Merge them →
01 · Event Horizon
Gravity you can see
Fly around a still or spinning black hole. Change the optics, trace a ray, and explore how gravity bends the light.
Explore the light →
02 · The Recomposition
Into the swirl
A ship stretches into a noodle and swirls around a spinning black hole on 2,400 exact orbits until it is gone. Then time runs backward.
Watch it fall in →
03 · The Plunge
Through the edge
Ride a ship into a black hole, through its edge, to the centre. See what the pilot sees, with the real numbers for its size.
Take the plunge →04 · Probe Experiments
Choose a launch
Place a spacecraft or a light pulse. Change your aim, speed and the hole’s spin. Compare up to six paths and watch the two clocks.
Open the probe bench →05 · Star Encounters
One star, four futures
Start with one Sun-like star. Watch four alternative approaches separate into a wide flyby, a grazing pass, a tidal disruption and a plunge. Then choose your own star and black hole.
Compare the four passes →08 · The Last Black Hole NEW
What if there’s nothing left to eat?
The disk fades. The black hole remains. Journey beyond the last stars, explore Hawking’s predicted evaporation, and discover why the final frame is still unknown.
Journey to the far future →You choose the initial conditions
Make your own experiment.
Choose a launch, or choose a star and a black hole. Change one thing, then compare the paths, clocks and outcomes. Keep your trials, replay them, and share what you find.
Throw something in.
Pick something, pick a black hole, and see what really happens. Numerical light tracing and gravitational models, with approximations and artistic choices clearly identified.
The real ones.
Photographed 2019
M87*
6.5 billion times the Sun’s mass, 55 million light-years away. The Event Horizon Telescope turned Earth into one giant dish to photograph its shadow: a dark centre in a ring of bent light, like the one behind this page.
See the real image ↗Photographed 2022
Sagittarius A*
The black hole at the centre of our own galaxy: 4.3 million Suns, 27,000 light-years away. Stars swing around it in years; their orbits are how we know it is there.
See the real image ↗Heard 2015
Two become one
Two black holes initially estimated at 36 and 29 solar masses merged about 1.3 billion years ago. Our interactive preset uses another published estimate (35.6 and 30.6 solar masses). The ripple in space reached Earth in 2015 and was detected as a rising “chirp”. They merged; nothing split.
Hear the chirp ↗ · Merge two yourself →Curiosity needs a clear boundary
What’s real.
What’s chosen.
Equations make a compelling picture. Each scene says which parts are exact and which are chosen to tell the story.
01Black-hole light
Every pixel follows its light path through the Schwarzschild (still) or Kerr (spinning) solution of Einstein’s equations, numerically, with finite steps. The disk’s brightness and temperature are chosen; its motion, Doppler shift and redshift are not. This page’s background is the same calculation at low resolution.
02The swirl, and time run backward
In The Recomposition every piece of the ship follows its own exact orbit around a spinning black hole, just under the capture limit, so it swirls before it plunges. The spread of orbits across the ship is chosen, not a breakup calculation, and the glow of stretched metal is artistic. Running the fall backward is the story’s premise: a real black hole never gives anything back.
03The plunge
The Plunge traces light through a non-spinning black hole in a form that is smooth across the edge, from the viewpoint of a ship falling freely on a curving path, and shows the real distances, times and tides for the size you choose. The disk is an idealized sheet. What happens at the very centre is unknown.
04“Throw something in”
Tidal stretch across an object is 2GM/r³ times its size. A body is torn apart where that exceeds what holds it together: about 100 g for a person, an assumed 1,000 g for a strong hull, and its own gravity for planets and stars (the standard tidal-disruption radius). Time from the edge to the centre is (2/3) × rs/c for a fall from far away. These are rough, standard estimates.
05Feed the Black Hole and the merger
Each piece follows the gravity of a still black hole in a form that matches three of general relativity’s key numbers exactly: the closest stable orbit, the closest bound orbit and the capture limit. Objects break where tides beat their strength or their own gravity. Small things are drawn bigger than life, never moved. Merging black holes follow Peters’ gravitational-wave formula and fits to numerical relativity. See every check →
06Your browser
Everything runs on your device; there is no account or tracking. Fonts load from Google Fonts. Reduced-motion settings pause the animations. A recent browser with WebGL2 is needed for the live scenes.
Questions people ask.
Does spaghettification stretch you until your atoms are in single file?
Not quite. The tide pulls your near end harder than your far end, so you tear into a stream of pieces that keep breaking smaller as you fall. At the edge of a small black hole the biggest surviving pieces are about a centimetre across. Atoms themselves are only pulled apart about 16 attoseconds (16 billionths of a billionth of a second) before the centre, and that is the same for every black hole, big or small, if known physics still holds there. Open “How thin does it get?” →
Can a black hole eat a galaxy?
No. Even the heaviest black holes weigh about a thousandth of their galaxy and are millions to billions of times smaller than it. Our galaxy’s black hole eats a star roughly every 10,000 to 100,000 years; eating all 100 billion would take far longer than the age of the universe. Zoom in and see why →
What if a moon-sized battle station fell in?
A 160 km station built of steel-strength material is torn apart about 300,000 km out from a 10-Sun black hole. At our galaxy’s Sagittarius A* it breaks just outside the edge. M87* swallows it in one piece. Throw one in →
Would a black hole swallow the Sun whole?
Only a very big one: above about 100 million Suns. Smaller black holes tear the Sun apart first, and about half of its gas is flung back out to space while the rest returns, weeks to months later, to feed the hole. Watch it →
What happens when two black holes merge?
They spiral together, radiating gravitational waves faster and faster, then become one bigger, spinning hole. The first pair ever detected, 36 and 31 Suns, turned about 3 Suns of mass into waves in a fraction of a second. Merge them →
The next part of the journey
What if the intelligence
that comes next is ours?
SphereShift Labs explores a future of superintelligent humans. The essay sets out the vision. Its first tools are live now, and a playable experience is taking shape.
02 · The essay03 · Coming soon
04 · Live now
1-1-3: Peace
One law. One rule. Three kinds of space. Joe Truax’s thesis on life, freedom and civilization after human superintelligence.
Read the argument →The Ladder
The thesis’s tools, working today. Guess Earth’s space weather against NOAA’s scientists, or time a paper helicopter at home. Every guess is locked in before the real answer arrives, and reality keeps score. Easy, Standard and Expert reading levels.
Try it →From experiment to possibility
Keep going?
Gravity brought you here. Now consider what humanity could become. Continue into 1-1-3: Peace. Its world is being built for you to walk through.
The simulations explain their physical models. The thesis and game explore a proposed future.