A Black Hole Engine That Could Power Spaceships

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

 

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5391989/a-black-hole-engine-that-could-power-spaceships

 

Honestly wonder how close we are to doing this, and how much closer we are to some dimwit deciding to weaponize these monsters

Artificially generated black holes could provide us with the power to make inter-solar travel a possibility. New research shows how strapping a black hole to your starship might just give you the juice to get to Alpha Centauri.

Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland of Kansas State University propose a way to use black holes as fuel that is entirely within the bounds of physics and technology as we know them, but would take phenomenal amount of engineering.

The crux of their idea involves using using a laser to form a micro black hole, which could be used as an energy source. This would be a Schwarzschild, or non-rotating, black hole which outputs Hawking Radiation, and the smaller the black hole, the more energetic.

 

Of course, making a black hole isn't the world's most easy undertaking. It takes a huge amount of power to build one in the first place. To make one of these mini black holes, Crane and Westmoreland propose a 370km2 solar panel, at an orbit one million km from the surface of the sun, which, if perfectly efficient, would gather enough energy per year to make one black hole. This power would be fed to a spherically converging gamma laser, with a lasing mass of around 10^9 tonnes. However, after you make a few black holes, you can use them as a power source to make more.

According to the authors, a black hole to be used in space travel needs to meet five criteria:

1. has a long enough lifespan to be useful,

2. is powerful enough to accelerate itself up to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light in a reasonable amount of time,

3. is small enough that we can access the energy to make it,

4. is large enough that we can focus the energy to make it,

5. has mass comparable to a starship.

Fortunately, black holes have a sweet spot in terms of size, power and lifespan which is almost ideal. If you take a trip to Alpha Centauri, with an acceleration of 1g to the half way point, and then decelerate at 1g for the remainder of the journey, the trip takes a relativistic 3.5 years. A black hole that would survive the entire trip would have a radius of 0.9 attometers, would have a mass of 606,000 tonnes, and a power output of 160 petawatts. The lifespan of the black hole could be extended by feeding it mass, too.

For longer trips, you could use larger but weaker holes, and smaller and more powerful ones for short trips.

Getting the black hole to act as a power source also requires a bit of work. One potential method involves placing the hole at the focal point of a parabolic reflector attached to the ship, creating forward thrust. A slightly easier, but less efficient method would involve simply absorbing all the gamma radiation heading towards the fore of the ship, and let the rest shoot out the back to push you onwards.

Of course, there are potential problems with Crane and Westmoreland's ideas. According to Govind Menon, Professor of Physics at Troy University, most views on extracting energy from black holes involve using ones that rotate. "With non-rotating black holes, this is a very difficult thing...we typically look for energy almost exclusively from rotating black holes. Schwarzschild black holes do not radiate in an astrophysical, gamma ray burst point of view. It is not clear if Hawking radiation alone can power starships." Menon adds that extracting energy from black holes is highly problematic. "Given [this type] of black hole, it is not clear to me how someone would go about extracting energy."

Another issue is what to do with the black hole when it reaches the end of its life span, as they tend to explode. "Such an explosion is powerful by terrestrial standards, but not by astronomical standards", say Crane and Westmoreland, so it's merely a matter of dropping the black hole around 1 AU away from anything too important, and letting it detonate.

With a set of four machines: black hole generator, black hole drive, power plant, and a self perpetuating black hole powered black hole generator, the potential is enormous. As Crane and Westmoreland say:

A civilization equipped with our four machine tool set would be almost unimaginably energy rich. It could settle the galaxy at will.

 

[cr47t]

I personally think that it is a very bad idea to make artificial black holes to begin with, let alone use them.

If you make any mistakes, or even if you don't, said artificial black holes could very well end up screwing over the thing that it was made to power to begin with. Not only that but it could then affect anything astronomical that we need to live on this planet. (ex. it's energy field mixing up that of the sun's, which could throw Earth of it's orbit around the sun which we rely on to live. Or worse, it could end up eating any of the things mentioned above or more. I personally find the idea too much of a risk, I am sure there are way too many uncertainties. If we could harness the power of something we can control more safely, like fusion, to do some of the things this idea proposes, I would prefer that.

 

I believe that Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland suggest this idea with good intentions, and I appreciate that. However I believe that using such a dangerous space object is too risky for us, and if we as a society could find a middle ground, that would be great. By a middle ground, I mean an energy source that has great potential but also is safe for people. 

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

I mean it's a micro blackhole, so eating anything is pretty much out of the question. A terrestrial explosion would be very deadly, but a cosmic one may not be (outside of a couple trillion in money loss)

[Aerion Brightflame]

I mean it's a micro blackhole, so eating anything is pretty much out of the question. A terrestrial explosion would be very deadly, but a cosmic one may not be (outside of a couple trillion in money loss)

 

It's still going to generate a large gravitational field in a place one shouldn't exist. 

 

If not properly controlled and contained, it will funk with something it shouldn't do, and we have no idea the issues which that will occur. Given we don't fully understand Black Holes, we can only hypothesis. 

[LordCowCowCowCowCowCowCowCow]

Seeing as we still don't understand Black Holes and, by their very nature, are nearly impossible to actually understand, this would be really bad.

[cr47t]

It's still going to generate a large gravitational field in a place one shouldn't exist. 

 

If not properly controlled and contained, it will f*** with something it shouldn't do, and we have no idea the issues which that will occur. Given we don't fully understand Black Holes, we can only hypothesis. 

 

 

Seeing as we still don't understand Black Holes and, by their very nature, are nearly impossible to actually understand, this would be really bad.

These. When it comes to space you dont want to mess around, especially with something really dangerous like what is proposed by the OP post.

If the drive dosen't work for travel, it will probably f*** up a bunch of stuff it shouldn't. I really dont suggest this for travel sources.

If it dosen't work as a weapon, it will probably do the same thing that it would in the above situation.

If it does work as a weapon, however, that's gonna be worse.

[vla1ne]

this is one of those things that while possible, should not have it's first attempt (or any subsequent ones) within, or around the earth. I'm all for it, but the warning "do not try his at home" has never been more applicable. attempting to create black holes might be awesome and potentially practical, but it needs to wait until it can be done far away from our home planet.