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A group of scientists from Columbia University recently published an article detailing how humanity could fuel an off-Earth colony by tapping into one of the universe’s largest and most powerful resources: black holes.
The big idea here is that a rotating black hole gives off a certain amount of energy. If we enveloped this energy field with an external source of gravity (a big gravity cannon?), We could force the singularity to generate negative energy. This negative energy, theoretically, would switch places with some positive energy escaping, freeing it from the black hole’s hungry grip and making it available for use as an energy source.
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Basically, we would turn a black hole into a perpetual battery. This could be very useful for any future Earthman who plans to live on another planet or in a distant space station. Currently, we don’t have any solid method of getting things done in space.
According to the team’s research paper:
Rotating black holes store rotational energy that can be extracted. When a black hole is immersed in an externally supplied magnetic field, reconnecting magnetic field lines in the ergosphere can generate particles of negative energy (relative to infinity) that fall into the horizon. black hole events while other accelerated particles escape to steal the energy of the dark. hole. We show analytically that the extraction of energy by magnetic reconnection is possible when the black hole spin is high… and the plasma is strongly magnetized.
Quick setting: It’s super cool. Realistically, Dyson’s spheres and other star-based theories always seemed to be the most likely method by which we would perpetually fuel colonies out of the world. But does this alternative actually seem… easier? It stands to reason that it would take less equipment to siphon energy from a black hole than to wrap a star with an energy conversion mechanism. All of this, of course, is speculative since we are not quite at the design phase of these hypothetical machines.
From an engineering / computer perspective, however, obtaining power from a Singularity could be a nightmare. We would probably be forced to operate the “sucker,” just outside the singularity’s event horizon. It goes without saying that we would need quantum computation algorithms that are much more robust than those of today to handle this type of computation. And figuring out how to deal with unpredictable bursts of energy, in the physical and material sense, would be an incredible challenge.
Researchers clearly demonstrate that it is possible to siphon energy from a spinning black hole, but we all know there is no free lunch when it comes to energy exchange, at least not with current technology.
The good news is, by the time we’re able to get humans close enough to a black hole to build this kind of almost infinite back-up battery for space colonies, we’ll likely be able to deliver stronger and better AI. robust. physical materials.
Check out the full article here in the APS Physics journal.
Published January 15, 2021 – 19:50 UTC
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