New proposed power source for spaceships

[ScarleTomato]

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

sounds like a pretty awesome RTS to me. One spaceship per star per year as long as you have enough RU's, or you can use 10 black holes to make a black hole generator so you can make 2 spaceships a year, etc...

[iron maiden]

sounds like a good idea, but what happens if you lose control of one, especially near earth

[ScarleTomato]

meh, it'll be bad, but by that time hopefully we'll have grown into a type2 civilization, and such a catastrophe would be Chernobyl bad, but not "were facing extinction now!" bad.

[iron maiden]

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmhhhhhhhhhhh.......i don;t know. I mean, aren't we supposed to die in a few years anyway, the movies never lie.

[bigbadbogie]

It sounds pretty bloody dangerous.

I would recommend that we found another way to get to alpha centauri and then use that star to generate black holes.

Keep the things away from Earth though...

[AHadley]

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmhhhhhhhhhhh.......i don;t know. I mean, aren't we supposed to die in a few years anyway, the movies never lie.

We've been through this. The movies are a load of boll***s.

[anomaly]

This sounds awesome, difficult and dangerous.  I'm all for it.  Let's get to work people!

[mrtwosheds]

The only small problems being that "black holes" of this size are entirely theoretical, none have ever been found or their effects detected.
Nobody has a clue how to contain one and that it is highly likely that the theory's of time/space/gravitation/quantum mechanics that lead them to think that this may be possible are in fact just completely wrong...a very large proportion of "theory's" turn out to be wrong and in my humble, not particularly well educated opinion, the current ones seem to have a considerable number of big and very black holes in them.

[TheJamsh]

large hadron collider anybody? allegedly we were all supposed to die then too... i hear a lot of theorising and not a lot of happening...

*he says as an electron tidalwave disolves him into dust*

[Arbystrider]

Oh yeah the LHC. Protons accelerate to near lightspeed and collide. Sweet! What an experiment.

How about this: Antimatter for energy. You do know that when you collide antimatter with matter, you get loads of energy? It kinda depends on Einstein's equation of how much you get.

But HECK producing a tiny bit of antimatter would take a few years. Maybe more.

[Clavin12]

You know particle accelerators are really quite intuitive. I mean what better way to find out about something than to spin it around very fast and smash it together with another of its kind? Quite ingenious....

[AHadley]

But HECK producing a tiny bit of antimatter would take a few years. Maybe more.

Antimatter is suprisingly simple. Each of the classic fundamental particles is made from a particle called a Quark, which have six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. Antiparticles are created by using antiquarks.

Neutron  ==>    Antineutron
Proton    ==>    Antiproton
Electon  ==>    Positron
etc. (there are more sub-atomic particles but these are the only three you are expected to know unless you're studying physics like me)

Antimatter is simply created by bunging them all together.

Hydrogen is made from a proton and an electron, so antihydrogen is a positron orbiting an antiproton. Add another antiproton, positron and an antineutron and you have antihelium.

Antihydrogen at least has already been created at CERN, and in fact occurs naturally all over the world. Antimatter? Been there, done that, let's have a collider now


[/physicsnerd]

[Clavin12]

So what happens when you mix hydrogen and antihydrogen?

[iron maiden]

So what happens when you mix hydrogen and antihydrogen?

BOOM!

[AHadley]

When a particle and antiparticle collide, a phenomenon known as annihilation occurs. Take electrons and positrons, for example. The two particles cancel each other out and a massless particle called a gamma photon (gamma radiation) is emitted. This photon may later decay back into an electron and positron.