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 if it might be possible to delay the end 鈥渟o you live longer and are tortured for less time鈥�.
In a report submitted to Physical Review D, Deborah Freedman of Harvard University suggests a giant ring-shaped structure would do the job. Its gravity would counteract that of the black hole as you fell, keeping your feet and head dropping at the same rate. That would give you an extra 0.09 seconds to observe the event horizon, before being torn apart in the space of just 0.003 seconds.
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