The Price of Curiosity: Information Recovery in de Sitter Space

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Recent works have revealed that quantum extremal islands can contribute to the fine-grained entropy of black hole radiation reproducing the unitary Page curve.

• In this paper, we use these results to assess if an observer in de Sitter space can decode information hidden behind their cosmological horizon.
• By computing the fine-grained entropy of the Gibbons-Hawking radiation in a region where gravity is weak we find that this is possible, but the observer's curiosity comes at a price.
• At the same time the island appears, which happens much earlier than the Page time, a singularity forms which the observer will eventually hit.