4 ms·
That's a really good idea. Come to think of it, could black holes actually be used as an energy source? A setup like the one he describes would create a tempe
by colanderman 16y ago
That's a really good idea.
Come to think of it, could black holes actually be used as an energy source? A setup like the one he describes would create a temperature gradient, and it's easy to extract power from that.
That would only make sense if this process somehow "depleted" the black hole; otherwise one could reverse entropy. IANA theoretical physicist so I don't know which mechanisms would be at work here.
- aphyr 16y agoNon-relativistically speaking (danger will robinson!), the photons emitted by the radiator have a huge gravitational potential associated with them. You're free, I believe, to extract that energy through a heat engine if you like, but I'm not sure the how feasible or efficient it would be. I'm totally ignorant on the GR front; where's RobotRollCall?
- geuis 16y agoI wonder if black holes might be usable as cosmic-scale batteries. Suppose your civ was preparing to settle in for long-term survival into the super distant future. You might not need high amounts of energy, just a low constant supply for incredibly long amounts of time. You could drop a good percentage of a galaxy's mass into a black hole, then use the evaporated Hawking radiation over cosmological time scales to power your civ. Suppose that the entities living inside this civ are simulations. A second to us might be tens of thousands of years to them, because their hardware processing runs very slowly because of the low amounts of available energy.
- hugh3 16y agoThere's a lot of energy to be had simply in pushing black holes around 'til they crash into each other.
- neolefty 16y agoOr for young whipper-snapper civilizations who want to live faster, you could turn that black hole + galaxy-sized mass into a really big hydro-electric plant -- that is, power your civ from the potential energy.
- jacques_chester 16y agoIf your blackhole is spinning, you can use its magnetic field as a source of energy. Eventually you will have robbed it of its spin, but that will take ... some time.
- kristianp 16y agoMicroscopic black holes have been theorized as power sources for starships. The Hawking radiation becomes more intense, the smaller the black hole is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship