If the Olympics Were Held in Space

Back in the day, before the speed of light was considered the slow lane, “extreme” sports—bungee jumping from bridges, hang gliding over volcanoes—were barely deadly and almost quaint. But with the advent of hyperflight, adventure sports are undergoing a revolution. Thrill seekers are now testing boundaries far beyond Earth’s atmosphere: scaling mountains on Mars, surfing powerful stellar gas jets, and playing chicken with black holes.

Profiting handsomely from all this action is Jimmy Doogle, founder of the Extraterrestial Sports and Programming Network (ETSPN). “Thank God for the spacetime continuum,” he says with a laugh, during which he earned another trillion dollars. Nautilus recently caught up with Doogle to find out what today’s adrenaline junkies do for a fix.

Black-Hole Diving

According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, nothing escapes a black hole. So a diver’s goal is to get as close as possible to the point just