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If you can electromagnetically trap enough antimatter to use it as fuel you could as well trap a miniature charged black hole that can be fed regular matter to
by IsTom 11mo ago
If you can electromagnetically trap enough antimatter to use it as fuel you could as well trap a miniature charged black hole that can be fed regular matter to produce power, which skips the whole inefficient part of making antimatter.
- DennisP 11mo agoDepends. Do we know how to obtain a miniature black hole?
- octaane 11mo agoThere have been several proposals. This paper proposes a feasable mechanism[1]: -"a SBH could be artificially created by firing a huge number of gamma rays from a spherically converging laser. The idea is to pack so much energy into such a small space that a BH will form." 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803 https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803
- piannucci 11mo agoThere’s a recent paper on the formation of such a “kugelblitz”; it’s argued to be unfeasible. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02389 https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02389
- randallsquared 11mo agoThe biggest problem is that if you're creating it with lasers, you're only going to get the energy out that you put in. You really want to be able to feed it matter, which would effectively make it an anything-to-gamma-radiation converter, which means you have to feed it quite a lot of matter, against the radiation pressure of all that energy coming out. The paper mentioned assumes a worst case of not being able to feed the black hole at all, but doesn't (in my skim) address the fact that this means you have to put in all the energy you'll be using for the lifetime of the black hole at the creation of it, which seems significantly more outrageously infeasible than the bare necessity of creating a black hole at all.
- jojobas 11mo agoDoes anyone address the fact that a black hole will be falling towards the center of the earth at 1g? How do you handle a black hole?
- impossiblefork 11mo agoMiniature black holes would just evaporate. Antimatter wouldn't.
- fooker 11mo agoNot before efficiently converting a large amount of mass into usable energy.
- GenerWork 11mo agoHow could we harness this energy and make it usable?
- einpoklum 11mo agoYou could pen a carefully-worded a letter of demands and send it to some Billionaire? A bit on the risky side, but - hey, you only live once etc.
- fooker 11mo agoIf I knew that, I'd probably have more important things to do than comment it here.
- remarkEon 11mo agoYou use it to boil water.
- 0-_-0 11mo agoIt's almost a meme at this point
- fooker 11mo agoThe real question is if we'll get back hole or antimatter powered steam engines before GTA 6
- Symmetry 11mo agoYou can even dissolve the uranium in the water and use the same substance for both fuel and propellant and so capable of reaching far higher temperatures than those that would cause any engine to melt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket
- vkou 11mo ago> a miniature charged black hole that can be fed regular matter to produce power, What form of power and through what principle?
- andrewflnr 11mo agoHawking radiation, I think. Yes, this is at best speculatively feasible.
- manphone 11mo agoProbably more like a water wheel - matter spinning around the hole can be accelerated.
- Qem 11mo agoA spacecraft carrying a blackhole as propulsion means probably would have poor power to weight ratio.
- idiotsecant 11mo agoNot at all. It would have one of the best power to weight ratios possible. Now as to whether you could use all that power....
- galacticaactual 11mo agoThey made a movie about this. It didn’t end so well for the crew.
- gavinmckenzie 11mo agoI admit to invoking the phrase “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see” at least once a year when something feels like it’s going horribly wrong.
- m4rtink 11mo agoBut it was one hell of a ride! ;-)
- dmead 11mo agoThe romulan empire does this.
- antonvs 11mo agoWe know how to make antimatter and have actually done it. We have no realistic way to obtain a black hole of any size.