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Not much chance at all. But a trip to a black hole – that is, to the vicinity of a black hole – is not a problem. If you go to the event horizon you will go inside and very probably perish, but if you go near the black hole and if the black hole is big enough, the tidal forces don’t kill you and don’t destroy your ship. A slingshot around the black hole is a very powerful way to navigate through the universe.

If you have two black holes orbiting each other, you can bring a spaceship in and go on a slingshot around one of the black holes, then towards the other one and around, then back to the first one. If you design it so the black holes are moving towards each other, each time you launch from one to the other, you can accelerate up to very high speeds – a large fraction of the speed of light if you have a black hole binary, particularly if it’s elliptical. We don’t have a black hole binary, so we can’t do it, but I can well imagine that very, very advanced civilisations use this as a way of accelerating to very high speeds, without any discomfort for the intelligent beings and without using any fuel. Kip Thorne was Feynman professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology until 2009 and a Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 2017

“If you go to the event horizon you will go inside and very probably perish”

Kip Thorne

Right: The idea of travelling through black holes has been used heavily in sciencefiction Below: Earth’s tectonic activity was vital when it came to the evolution of life