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Yes - I took the grandparent comment's "descr to a non-physicist" as "describe to someone who really isn't into math or hard sciences". Those folks will hear "million trillion" as "a really Really REALLY REALLY big number". Not as "1 x 10^18".


I guess, but "light year" is easy to say, easy to understand, and much less likely to mislead. And most black holes would probably be safe at that distance.

Though the issue of small black holes is worth bringing up. If you scrunch up one cubic kilometer of stone into a black hole, that's heavy to be stable for trillions of years, but light enough to pass between the Earth and the moon without causing serious problems. And we really have no idea what the smallest existing black hole is.


You'd be surprised how may people don't even understand that a light year is a measure of distance.


Hmm. Well even then I think a million million miles will suffice, that's over ten thousand AU, .17 light years.


Maybe? But if (1) it's a few solar masses, and (2) the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud exists - "from 2,000 to 200,000 AU" - then the black hole could send a lot of planetesimals flying off in random directions. Quite of few of those could be moving toward Earth's neighborhood, some at very high speed. Humans might soon join the dinosaurs.




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