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...
sounds like a good idea, but what happens if you lose control of one, especially near earth
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.
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmhhhhhhhhhhh.......i don;t know. I mean, aren't we supposed to die in a few years anyway, the movies never lie.
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...
Quote from: iron maiden on November 05, 2009, 10:01:40 PM
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.
This sounds awesome, difficult and dangerous. I'm all for it. Let's get to work people!
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.
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*
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.
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....
Quote from: Arbystrider on November 06, 2009, 01:19:43 PM
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 :evil:
[/physicsnerd]
So what happens when you mix hydrogen and antihydrogen?
QuoteSo what happens when you mix hydrogen and antihydrogen?
BOOM!
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.
You might as well call it a gamma ray.
And how can a massless particle decay into a particle WITH mass?!?! And aren't positrons produced by positron decay in unstable elements?
Quote from: Arbystrider on November 07, 2009, 05:12:29 AM
And how can a massless particle decay into a particle WITH mass?!?!
e=mc^2
This equation details how energy can be made from mass. If you take 100g of uranium-235 and you put it in a sealed container and you leave it there, when you take it out you will end up with 99.99999999g of uranium-235. Depends how long you leave it though.
You forgot about mc^2/SqRoot of 1 - c^2/v^2.
And I remember trying to calculate light energy the other day using that equation. Thus, E = [0*300,000,000]/{SqRoot [1-((300,000,000^2)/300,000,000^2) = E= 0. So what I conclude as for now is that photons do not carry any energy. But I know I'm wrong. How do they get the energy?
HEY ZOMG we're talking about particle phyics, one of my interests.
I wouldn't really worry about using this type of power for short trips as stated. Even though black holes are something I wouldn't want to be anywhere near, micro black holes are short living and cannot create enough force (for lack of a better word) to increase its mass before it expires. At least this is what I am lead to believe, I'm not a scientist.
Even if we did get it working, and even if we managed to get a ship to travel at the speed of light, then it would take the crew six years to get to the edge of the solar system (our front door in cosmic terms)
Since time passes slower the quicker something is travelling (even if I'm just walking around the room time is going slower for me than my brother slobbing on the sofa :P) then it wouldn't be six years to the rest of us, but still... six years? That's going to get really boring after a while.
Well... Einstein's theory suggests that time stops for the travellers when we move at the speed of light. So... I think they feel like going anywhere would take an instant?
Einstein's experiment does nothing to suggest that the speed of light is the magic zero value. I haven't looked at it in depth because I am more a particle physicist.
Quote from: Arbystrider on November 08, 2009, 09:10:10 AM
Well... Einstein's theory suggests that time stops for the travellers when we move at the speed of light. So... I think they feel like going anywhere would take an instant?
Einstein's theory states that time is relative (hence "Theory of Relativity"), and the closer to the speed of light you travel, the slower time will go (for you). If you're going at the speed of light, and you're going further than 300000000 miles, it would feel like longer than one second, but for the rest of the universe, it would be longer, since you're moving at the speed of light. Time does not stop. Time never stops.
This isn't new, Romulan ships use it in Star Trek and i saw it used in a movie long ago.
I never did really understand that theory, I think it all depended on the concept that the speed of light was a constant, It has since been shown that it is not.
In fact allot of these space/time theory's seem to depend on imaginary constants, that probably don't exist at all. Its very hard to perform meaningful calculations without some fixed point to anchor them to. Infinity/nothing has no fixed points at all.
QuoteIn fact allot of these space/time theory's seem to depend on imaginary constants, that probably don't exist at all. Its very hard to perform meaningful calculations without some fixed point to anchor them to. Infinity/nothing has no fixed points at all.
i know, these scientists always come up with new theory's revolving around "If it exists" or " should this happen" bah, makes me sick! [i know, overexagerated]
Just a sidenote for those who might not know... the image in the post is from the motion picture Event Horizon, which is also the name of the ship that had that device installed. It was thought that it would punch a hole in spacetime and create an artificial wormhole but things went horribly wrong and it crossed into another dimension altogether, which drove the crew mad and made them kill eachother. It was said that they actually made it to hell.
As far as I understood, at least one idea was to collect the radiotion emitted by the black hole to propel the ship forward, kind of like a solar sail, only having the sun anchored to the ship. It's different, I must admit, and it could actually work.
But they're using such an exotic body to power a ship in such a conventional way... it seems such a waste. I was hoping for something more along the lines of a pair of black holes creating a pseudo warp effect, causing the ship to move inside a gravitational bubble.
On a side note: someone said that the holes would be too small to create very much trouble, but wouldn't accidentally feeding it enough mass turn it into the world gobblers we all know (and love) ?
On another side note: The article states that it would require the sun's energy over a period of a year to be stored (somehow, that would be in itself a great feat of engineering) in order to create a black hole. And after we create several we could harnes them to create more. But, would't that fail? I mean... all energy to energy or energy to matter conversions happen with a loss of said energy.
Say you have a battery and you use it to power a motor that in turn power a generator to charge another battery of the same type, then reverse batteries. After a while, because of friction and heating in the wires and whatnot, both batteries would be dead. So if we create two black holes and harnes their power, wouldn't we be able to create only one and a leftover?
I must admit, I'm not great with advanced physics so correct me if I'm wrong.
I also have a question. I have read that in a revolving black hole, the event horizon is not a sphere, but a torus, or a ring. Would that mean that in the exact center, gravity cancels itself out... and could that be a gateway of some sorts, seing as space is so curved around that point? Or would it just be a normal region of space in the middle of a maelstrom?
The thought is the black holes make energy in a way other than what you put in. Think of it like using energy to mine coal that we burn for energy.
Yes, but in coal, the energy is already there, and we only release it through combustion. If we create black holes, we will have to inject energy into them, by accelerating particles and smashing them against each other so they fuse and collapse. But we will have to come up with all the energy since the particles themselves will not have as much as a lump of coal, hence the solar array. Also... the hawking particles the black holes give is a kind of evaporation so with each hawking particle emitted, it will get weaker and weaker ...and so it would consume more energy than it will give off.
But, like I said, I'm not that good at physics so I might be wrong.
IIRC they expel radiation from their poles from matter they absorb, unless it was the multidimensional energy from somewhere else thing.
Quotelike I said, I'm not that good at physics so I might be wrong.
At this sort of physics (physics fiction) you are as good as anyone!
Quote from: Nielk1 on November 27, 2009, 12:40:06 AM
IIRC they expel radiation from their poles from matter they absorb, unless it was the multidimensional energy from somewhere else thing.
I thought they were going to contain the black hole in a magnetic field or something so nothing actually gets sucked in, which would cause the black hole to become unstable with possibly dire consequences.
The two polar jets you're talking about are something else. And I think they can't appear at such small black holes. We are talking, if not microscopic, then mostly a pin head sized one.
But how do you contain one, anyway? I mean... can magnetic fields contain gravity? That would be a more important discovery than how to actually harness the energy emitted from them.
Hawking radiation is... water, evaporating from a pot, one molecule at a time, very slowly. Small black holes have a shorter life because of this. While supermassive ones can keep losing particles for a long time before their mass can no longer cause a singularity and they first become visible, ghostly and then fully visible and decompose away into nothingness, small ones will generally "burn" out quite quickly. Black hole batteries, for your long lasting MP3 needs.
On a side note, seing as they will need large amounts of energy, I would love to see a Dyson Sphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere) created to harness the full power of our or any other sun.
OT: The Astronomical Zoo, the Black Hole exhibit, sign: Please, do not feed the black holes!
QuoteBut how do you contain one, anyway?
Erm, you don't, they contain you.
Don't you just love it when the clear distinction between science and science fiction get blurred. Micro black holes, Nobody has ever even found one, all the black holes we have (not) observed are huge, they are generally "contained" by galaxies. Theory's about "singularity's" are probably nonsense, just because when you tried to measure it your ruler got broke, does not mean that reality got broke too.
Black holes... area's of the universe we appear not to be able to see, probably caused by the gravitational lensing of light by Massive super dense celestial objects. We know nothing at all about what is actually in them, because we cannot see them. Daft ideas about them being holes in "the fabric of time and space" would be interesting if we had any sensible theory's about what the "fabric of time and space" is before we go making holes in it...
Common sense (not a science) would imply that "the fabric of time and space" is in fact nothing at all. So making a hole in it would make very little difference, add to that the obvious fact that gravity is caused by or linked to matter/energy/stuff that is the opposite of nothing at all, it seems obvious that gravitational lensing would actually be caused by a "Black Lump" Not a singularity at all, in fact something very big and very very solid.
Einstien theorised that Light travels at a constant speed. That theory made the "time/space singularity" the only possible way to cause a "black hole". If the speed of light is not a constant, the "singularity" is nonsense.