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Folks, if any physicists or astronomers could help me out in answering DS' question, I'd be grateful. I don't know if it's answerable. I'm out of my depth on this one:

What would happen if there were no black holes?

No idea - but I'll ask DS when he gets home and let you know!

Not a physicist or astronomer, but here's one answer: my understanding is that the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way imposes order on the rest of the bodies of the galaxy, in the same way that our sun imposes order on the planets and other bodies in the solar system. Absent that order, we'd likely have more frequent encounters with other stars, possibly disturbing planetary orbits enough that it could end life on this planet... perhaps by pushing Earth out of the Goldilocks zone, perhaps by inducing the moon to collide with us, or drive a shower of asteroids in at us...

Save that for a fun bedtime story on a stormy night.

Thanks Dude; that at least gives me the n-1 case. To compound the issue, when I googled "what if there were no black holes", coverage of a recent piece by Hawking came up:

http://www.nature.com/news/stephen-hawking-there-are-no-black-holes-1.14583

Aaaah!

Thanks Michelle!

I'd probably counter this question with "what is the nature of the request? That is, in what sense is the person wanting to know?"

Because I've answered entirely the wrong question from DD before re: this kind of thing, simply because I answered the way that an adult would ask the question-- and that's not always how a gifted child sees the world.

I've learned that "Why? What led you to ask this question?" is a good way to establish what kind of answer (detailed, brief, technical, speculative or factual, etc. etc.) the child is seeking.

Howler, that's a good approach. He was asking a series of questions testing out how human life is affected by different factors. Before asking about black holes, he asked about what would happen if:

- there were no fresh water, or fresh water couldn't be made
- there were no trees; no plants

Of course, there were some goofy "what if"s interspersed in there, but he seemed to be driving to "would humans be able to survive if there were no black holes?"

He's been on an existential kick lately. Ever since I had to be away for mornings for two weeks and hired a sitter, he's been cycling back and forth between questions about separation, life/death, and identity (baby/boy). The real root of this is concern over separation. That was temporary and obviously very short term, and ended 2 months ago, but it's thrown him through a loop, and he often talks about wanting us to be together forever, how long I'll love him, what will happen when I die, etc.

There are some really fun shows on cable describing the myriad ways life could be wiped out on this planet. One of them is "a black hole forms or otherwise passes through our galactic neighborhood." So there are definitely two sides to our relationship with them.

Aquinas, if you haven't seen it, you might want to take a look at the book What If?. Your DS probably can't read it independently yet, but I'm sure you'd have fun reading it together.

Gave DS "What If" for Christmas; he's already read it at least three times. I always know it's come back out for another round when I hear the fiendish giggles coming from the flashlight under the covers at 11 PM...