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Black holes spaceships are the ticket with our current understanding of physics. They can carry a large and heavy cargo in ship form or can push small planets s
by Detrus 15y ago
Black holes spaceships are the ticket with our current understanding of physics. They can carry a large and heavy cargo in ship form or can push small planets slowly in a desired direction. The travel times for black hole ships are reasonable too, about six years to Proxima Centauri. It beats the other sci-fi concepts like fusion, Orion, anti matter and solar sails.
Funny how solar sails seem like the easier option to build, but for interstellar travel you need enormous lasers near the home star to push the sail as it gets further away. Might as well build black holes with the lasers and solar collectors.
- 0x44 15y agoHow exactly does one build a black hole without obliterating ones host species/planet/solar system?
- cheez 15y agoA black hole doesn't have any more gravitational pull than normal. If you turned the Earth into a black hole by somehow compressing it past the required radius, the moon would still orbit it the same way. From what I understand anyway, I am not a physicist.
- Detrus 15y agoMost of their science paper is in layman English http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803v1 http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803v1 and explains such questions. The black holes they would build are very very tiny, about the size of a proton. They are relatively light, about 600,000 tons. Such a body doesn't have noticeable gravity, it's too light to attract anything and too small to absorb it. The big danger from these are explosions at the end of their life. The explosions are serious if they happened near Earth, but safe at the distance of Earth to Sun. They're built near the host star anyway.
- troels 15y ago? I thought it was the mass that made a black hole - not the density?
- adrianN 15y agoNo, you just require a sufficient pressure to overcome the repulsive forces between the particles to collapse them to a singularity. That's why people were afraid of the LHC.
- troels 15y agoAh .. And normally (If that is a word which makes sense in this context), the mass of a giant object (Like a star) would be the way to create this pressure? But theoretically you could do it by other means?
- weavejester 15y agoYou essentially need to cram a lot of mass into a very small space, which is equivalent to cramming a lot of energy into a very small space. So, theoretically, you can get a bunch of very, very large lasers, focus them all upon a very small point, and if you pump enough energy into the system you wind up with a black hole.
- lutorm 15y ago"just"... Nuclear matter is very stiff. It can make a mass of the order of the Sun's, falling down with a significant fraction of the speed of light, bounce without becoming a black hole. So the pressure you'd need to make a black hole with higher-than-nuclear density would be, well, astronomical.
- billswift 15y agoYou need sufficient mass for a black hole to be stable, otherwise it "evaporates". A very small black hole would evaporate so fast that "explodes" would be a better term.
- Confusion 15y agoThere is a minimum amount of mass necessary for an object to be able to collapse upon itself and form a black hole, such as a large star does when the outward pressure due to the internal fusion reaction stalls. However, any amount of mass can (in classical theory) be compressed far enough to obtain a Schwarzschild radius, from which light cannot escape. This has only to do with the density, not the total mass: a very small mass can still cause a large curvature of space, though only in a very small region of space.
- cpeterso 15y agoIf we can't travel faster than the speed of light (a reasonably safe assumption), maybe we can take intergalactic shortcuts like black holes. So it seems to me that Battlestar Galactica-style "jump" drives (or Borg transwarp conduits) are more likely than Star Trek-style warp drives.
- VladRussian 15y ago>If we can't travel faster than the speed of light using existing understanding of Nature - we can. At least the Universe provides the example of galaxies traveling with faster than the speed of light relative to each other. The same machinery is suggested in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive The opponents state that the energy requirement of the drive is higher than the whole Universe's energy. Obviously it is wrong statement as we already have whole galaxies mentioned above and whose faster than light speed obviously takes less than the whole Universe's energy.
- inklesspen 15y agoGalaxies are not actually moving faster than light. The distance between them is growing at a rate that would suggest FTL speeds because the universe is expanding.
- VladRussian 15y agolooks like you didn't get it that the drive i linked to is supposed to use the same principle of space expansion and contraction.
- inklesspen 15y agoGalaxies are not spaceships. Just because the natural expansion of the universe affects galaxies (and everything else) doesn't mean it's possible to artificially expand and contract the universe.
- 15y ago
- juretriglav 15y agoFor those of you who, like me, thought a black hole spaceship is a spaceship travelling through black holes, I made an awesome diagram of how it's supposed to work. http://www.juretriglav.si/images/blackholespaceship.png http://www.juretriglav.si/images/blackholespaceship.png
- cheez 15y agoHow the heck do you hold the black hole in place?
- pavel_lishin 15y agoMagnetic fields?
- cheez 15y agoThat's what I thought.