QED BLUE-SHEET EFFECTS INSIDE BLACK-HOLES

The interaction of the unboundedly blueshifted photons of the cosmic m icrowave background radiation with a physical object falling towards t he inner horizon of a Reissner-Nordstrom black hole is analyzed. To ev aluate this interaction we consider the QED effects up to the second o rder in the perturbation expansion. We then extrapolate the QED effect s up to a cutoff, which we introduce at the Planckian level. (Our resu lts are not sensitive to the cutoff energy.) We find that the energy a bsorbed by an infalling observer is finite, and for typical parameters would not lead to a catastrophic heating. However, this interaction w ould almost certainly be fatal for a human being, or other living orga nisms of similar size. On the other hand, we find that smaller objects may survive the interaction. Our results do not provide support for t he idea that the Cauchy horizon is to be regarded as the boundary of s pacetime.