Pretty cool review article.

Wasn't very forthcoming about the timescales required for the entropic balancing act to unfold, though. I'm pretty sure that because of almost infinite time dilation down near the event horizon, entangled pairs of anti-particles popping into existence which straddle the event horizon will take too damn long to accumulate into the entropic effect even beginning to erode a black hole via Hawking radiation. LOL I just looked it up, a supermassive black hole, like a galactic core (for posterity, Devac, as surely our readership is in the realm of this number as well:), it's literally a fucking google years to dissolve. Love it. An order of magnitude too many orders of magnitude to ever hope to solve with cosmological observations of large black holes. Small black holes might be the only way. Not in our lifetimes, surely (Edit: to clarify, I mean; we probably won't be successfully experimenting with lab-grown microscopic black holes in our lifetimes).

This is just conjecture, but I suspect that any quantum mechanical system we could ever build to resemble a black hole would be imperfect and hence asymmetric enough that any quantum black holes, even if successfully created, would go zooming off somewhere at just about c and poof evaporate before interacting with anything. Imagine fine-tuning this to calibrate the LIGO (or future LISA) beam with, recklessly shooting nano-scale black holes towards the Andromeda galaxy. Fast forward a few tens of millions of years, and we've wrecked an entire sector of a neighbor galaxy. Then it takes another few tens of millions of years for us to know about it. laugh track and "OOPSIE!!" face

Speaking of cosmology, check out a recent smackdown of Penrose. This refutation alone isn't technical enough for me to feel like the issue is fully decided, though.

I dunno, maybe this universe is the "white hole" result of a black hole formation in a higher dimensional space with a much higher characteristic energy density. Black hole singularities distort our universe's four dimensions with a radial symmetry (1D), so maybe our 4D universe was the result of a 7D universe's supermassive black hole initiation. 7D supernova. Yet another band name. Sorry, considerable amounts of my own "Penrosing" here.