4 ms·
It’s just too much mass in too little space. It’s essentially the same requirement as fusion, but almost infinitely more difficult. If you could make a fusion
by jleahy 5y ago
It’s just too much mass in too little space. It’s essentially the same requirement as fusion, but almost infinitely more difficult.
If you could make a fusion reactor almost infinitely better then it would produce a black hole which would immediately evaporate releasing more energy than you could ever imagine - but no way it can be done.
- sbierwagen 5y agoHawking radiation propulsion has the perfect specific impulse: exhaust velocity is the speed of light. Black hole hawking radiation also is perfectly efficient: 100% of the mass is converted into energy. D-T fusion only converts 0.4% of the mass to energy. There are many awful engineering problems of a black hole drive, but they're not so bad as to dismiss out of hand. See https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803v1
- kragen 5y agoYou know, if you asked Christiaan Huygens in 01671 about the possibility of detecting a 4-km-long tunnel getting shorter by a factor of one in a sextillion for a hundredth of a second, he surely would have doubted that it was possible. But it's only been 350 years, and when LIGO detected its first gravitational waves five years ago, that's precisely how it did it. By contrast, there's ample reason to believe that black-hole power plants are possible. In fact, the spatial precision required is actually the same order of magnitude as that of LIGO, about an attometer. So we might not even have to wait 350 years for it.