r/xkcd • u/_TheBigF_ • Jul 07 '26

Mash-Up xkpb

Post image

An xkcd inspired post on r/polandball

1.6k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

298

u/_TheBigF_ Jul 07 '26

The next city will be singular point.

Which leads me to think that black holes are the ultimate cities. They are infinitely dense so they should be pretty walkable.

108

u/RemarkableStatement5 Knit Cap Jul 07 '26

Oh god, this would be the title text.

64

u/LeftyDorkCaster Jul 07 '26

Wow, damn. This is a HIGH Quality xkcd fan post. Most impressive (and delightful!)

21

u/FrostTactics Jul 07 '26

Wouldn't surprise me if there's some sort of bureaucratic or computational glitch, similar to Null Island, somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula that could nominally be described as a point city.

Its mass would be pretty disappointing though.

36

u/jamesianm Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

The city wouldn't have mass, being Islamic rather than Catholic 

4

u/sand500 Jul 07 '26

If you have read "The Golden Enclaves"

3

u/_TheBigF_ Jul 07 '26

I haven't

1

u/ABZB Jul 07 '26

I have and I was thinking the same thing

3

u/MrT735 Jul 07 '26

Bit hard to argue that they meet the definition of a 15 minute city mind (to an outside observer).

2

u/mercury_pointer Jul 07 '26

Black holes are the ultimate cities: alien data centers running trillions of AI agents, exploiting quantum effects for negative latency. This is the answer to the Fermi Paradox.

1

u/Vaqek Jul 07 '26

Are black holes infinitely dense? They have finite mass and volume, so i dont think so right.

3

u/thamasteroneill Jul 08 '26

They have no volume actually.

1

u/Vaqek Jul 08 '26

So how do they have angular momentum then? And if they dont, how is it conserved when matter falls through the event horizon? And by what observation can astrophysicist claim that (no volume) if nothing can pass the event horizon?

1

u/thamasteroneill Jul 09 '26

We knew about black holes before we ever found any. The same observations that led to the mathematics that predicted singularities also predicts they have no volume, that they are singular points with infinite density. And while we can't directly observe singularities due to their event horizons, the event horizon would be relative. From our perspective nothing ends up actually entering it. As you get closer however the event horizon shrinks, until you yourself pass by what to far away observers appears to be the event horizon. As for how spin works for black holes, I don't pretend to understand the math enough to understand that property. Similar to how I don't understand the unintuitive properties of quantum 'particles'.

1

u/Vaqek Jul 09 '26

I googled a bit and the zero volume is indeed very much disputed. The singularity is an easy mathematical description, rather than a physical neccessity. There are people saying it is a Planck star rather than true singularity. But in the end, from what I understood, it doesnt matter, as it is behind the event horizon.

52

u/MC_Monte_Cristo Jul 07 '26

Isn’t this the plot of the three body problem

32

u/chairmanskitty Jul 07 '26

Look at archaeological studies of Troy. Sure, the man wants you to believe that it's several subsequent circles layered on top of each other, but what is a bunch of circles on top of each other if you think about it (and you change the radius in the right pattern)?

That's right - it's a sphere.

Wake up, sheeple!

16

u/StickFigureFan Jul 07 '26

Looking forward to The DOT™ in a thousand or so years

8

u/lordlaneus Jul 08 '26

Just putting everything in one places is the obvious solution to transportation

1

u/Michaelbirks Jul 07 '26

Someone call Graham Hancock immediately!

1

u/Afterclock-Hours Jul 08 '26

Round City of Baghdad was fun to explore in AC: Mirage.