Black Hole Starships, Energy and Weapons

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Very advanced civilizations could graduate from using regular stars for power and use black holes. Manufacturing of antimatter is hugely energy-inefficient, and antimatter is difficult to contain. The process of generating a Black hole from collapse is naturally efficient. It would require millions of times less energy than a comparable amount of antimatter or at least tens of thousands of times given some optimistic future antimatter generator. As to confinement, a Black hole confines itself. We would need to avoid colliding with it or losing it, but it won’t explode. Matter striking a BH would fall into it and add to its mass. So making a BH is extremely difficult, but it would not be as dangerous or hard to handle as a massive quantity of antimatter. Although the process of generating a BH is extremely massive, it does not require any new Physics.

A black hole to be used in space travel needs to meet five criteria:

* has a long enough lifespan to be useful,
* is powerful enough to accelerate itself up to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light in a reasonable amount of time,
* is small enough that we can access the energy to make it,
* is large enough that we can focus the energy to make it,
* has mass comparable to a starship.

A black hole weighing 606,000 metric tons would have a Schwarzschild radius of 0.9 attometers (0.9 × 10–^18 meters), a power output of 160 petawatts (160 × 10^15 W) and a 3.5-year lifespan. With such a power output, the black hole could accelerate to 10% the speed of light in 20 days, assuming 100% conversion of energy into kinetic energy. Assuming only 10% conversion into kinetic energy, it would take 10 times more.

There are a lot of unknowns and some physicists think that the energy conversion and propulsion generation problems would be too difficult.

Bolonkin believed that if we could master femtotech and mastery of degenerate matter then black hole generators would follow.

Alexander Bolonkin proposed the possibility of manipulating nucleons to produce stable, macroscopic structures of nuclear matter at zero pressure (which he calls “AB-matter”), by analogy with the nanotech ideas of directly manipulating atoms to build high-tech materials.

The basic claim is that an unbounded number of alternating protons and neutrons can be arranged in a fiber held together by residual nuclear force and a small contribution from magnetism due to the nucleon magnetic moments, and prevented from collapsing and held rigid by electrostatic repulsion. Superstrong macroscopic structures can then be built by combining these basic nuclear matter needles.

Bolonkin was a legitimate scientist (PhD in aerospace engineering).

Femtotechnology: Nuclear AB-Matter with Fantastic Properties” in American Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences and “Femtotechnology: Design of the Strongest AB Matter for Aerospace” in Journal of Aerospace Engineering.

This is all beyond our capability now, but we are talking about a civilization with mature nanotechnology and mastery of energies near black hole levels.

Black Hole Bomb

Arxiv – The black hole bomb and superradiant instabilities

A wave impinging on a Kerr black hole can be amplified as it scatters off the hole if certain conditions are satisfied giving rise to superradiant scattering. By placing a mirror around the black hole one can make the system unstable. This is the black hole bomb of Press and Teukolsky. We investigate in detail this process and compute the growing timescales and oscillation frequencies as a function of the mirror’s location. It is found that in order for the system black hole plus mirror to become unstable there is a minimum distance at which the mirror must be located. We also give an explicit example showing that such a bomb can be built. In addition, our arguments enable us to justify why large Kerr-AdS black holes are stable and small Kerr-AdS black holes should be unstable.

12 thoughts on “Black Hole Starships, Energy and Weapons”

  1. I am a novices’ novice in this dept, maybe 1 out of 100 ideas I have I may just stumble upon something or nothing. So what if you could create & harness a mini-black hole to the point where you have the technology to control the singularity, possibly like a nozzle on a jet engine
    to create a BHE (Black Hole Engine). C’mon how hard can it be to contain & control chaos?
    Don’t wimp out on me!

  2. ‘Schwarzschild radius of 0.9 attometers’
    IIUC, this would require heat/energy surface power transfer densities ~1.5*10^52 W/m^2 at the Schwarzschild radius hull for getting 160PW into surroundings?

    What are highest power densities (fission results to ~600kW/m^2 from fuel elements, electrical conductors, rays or gravitational waves? )?

    • The energy is coming out at that intensity naturally, in the form of very high energy radiation, which needs to be handled by equipment much further from the black hole.

      One way to do this is to surround the black hole with a very heat resistant molten metal, such as tungsten, which would be held in by the black hole’s gravity, intercept the very high energy particles, and radiate more easily handled thermal radiation; Several elements have boiling points over 5000K, and a few cubic meters of them would be nothing next to the mass of the black hole.

      • i see, thanks.
        Power density starts somewhere, even if surface area increases with distance (33km radius for a space ship imaginable for next centuries?) and this necessary power density is far above matter to energy conversion?
        Are there numbers for (surface) power density or examples for ‘very high energy radiation’, giving a picture, within nuclear science or astronomical observation?

        research on ultra high gamma rays ~2GW(?) for Planck energy conversion
        [ 1.22*10^28eV ~1.95GJ ~1.95GWs/1s 100GeV, while 1J =~ 10^10GeV=10E(xa)eV!
        ‘en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-high-energy_gamma_ray’
        ‘en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#/media/File:Gamma-ray-burst-Mechanism.jpg’

        While σ (the absorption) necessarily needs matter for interactions, me wondering, what is a theoretical range for area of (high energy) gamma rays? Why is there just few numbers on that item (‘flux density’ suitable for research for a single gamma ray area)? ]

  4. The femtotech ideas are, umm, very far fetched. Even in the 1930s people developed the liquid drop model of the nucleus – nuclear matter has effective surface tension, so long extended rods or wires of alternating p and n are not remotely stable.

  6. Hi Brian
    Black Hole Starships require the ability to focus thousands of tons of gamma-ray energy into very small target volumes. That’d be quite the trick. Just possibly the easier option is to start with quark matter and collapse it behind its own event horizon. Clearly a super-civilization will need technologies we can only vaguely glimpse at present.

    • This is why I was talking about the more mundane activity of making a dyson swarm around hypergiant stars for a million times the power of a dyson swarm around our sun or more commonly dyson swarms around other giant stars for hundreds to thousands of times our sun swarm.

      Also, I was talking about getting up to 90-99% of the speed of light to run away in all directions and never fighting any other civilization near “max tech”. Never seems to be worth while because if you have (mature molecular nanotech, AI, genome editing mastery, fusion, antimatter etc…) and so do they then having a conflict would not be worth taking the chance.

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