'We could live inside a supermassive black hole eventually... but super-aliens may have already beaten us to it,' claims Russian cosmologist

Most advanced civilisation in the galaxy could already be living inside, claims Vyacheslav Dokuchaev

Despite being considered the most destructive force in space and absolutely uninhabitable, the conditions for life exist inside supermassive black holes, a Russian cosmologist has theorised.

Going out on a scientific limb somewhat, Vyacheslav Dokuchaev has even suggested that if life did exist inside the SBH, it would have evolved to become the most advanced civilisation in the galaxy.



Supermassive black holes are such powerful gravitational forces that they suck in everything around them, including light, and nothing that crosses the black hole's 'event horizon' is ever seen again.

White noise? A Russian cosmologist says that life could exist inside a supermassive black hole - which flies in the face of accepted scientific theory

But now Dokuchaev, of Moscow's Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says existing evidence combined with new research throws up intriguing possibilities for certain types of black holes.

Inside a charged, rotating black hole there are regions where photons can survive in stable periodic orbits. Dokuchaev specialises in studying those orbits and their dynamics

He speculates, in a paper published in Cornell University's online journal arXiv, that if there are stable orbits for photons, there is no reason why there could not be stable orbits for larger objects, such as planets.

The problem is that these stable orbits would only exist once you have crossed the threshold of the event horizon, where time and space flow into one another.



Stable orbits: This diagram from Dokuchaev's paper shows the orbit of a photon stablising in a supermassive black hole, with thin line indicating the start point and thicker line the end point Science fiction: Laurence Fishburne (rear, cente) starred in the film Event Horizon, in which a spaceship passed through the space-time boundary

The event horizon, at the lip of the black hole, is known as the point of no return.

However, beyond the event horizon is another domain, known as the Cauchy horizon, where time and space return to stable states.

It is inside the Cauchy horizon that life could exist, Dokuchaev argues in a paper published in Cornell University's online journal arXiv,

However, the type of life that could exist in those conditions - where they would be subject to massive fluctuating tidal forces - would have evolved beyond ours.

The life that could exist there would likely be a civilisation ranked as Type III on the Kardashev Scale. There are three levels to the scale with one being the lowest and three the highest. Humanity is still looking to attain Level 1 status; mastery of its own planet.

'Interiors of the supermassive black holes may be inhabited by advanced civilisations... invisible from the outside,' he says.

Though that is a spine-tingling thought, Dokuchaev's proposition can only ever remain theoretical.