Trent Shipley wrote:
Is this plausible?
http://www.belfryenterprises.com/redgalaxy/index.php/Singularity_power
Trent--
It doesn't say much there, though. The plan would be
to use small black holes, putting mass in, and getting
photons out as (the postulated) Hawking radiation?
Richard Baker and others (even me) got into a discussion
of this on the Culture List in mid-September. To summarize:
There would be SERIOUS engineering problems.
One can't do much to steer small black holes.
Feeding them mass isn't really necessary, except
to stop them from runaway evaporation as LOTS of
hard gamma rays. (They emit black body radiation,
and the temperature is inversely proportional to
their mass.)
As Rich put it:
...
Not too charged, though, or else they'll start to repel the matter
we're feeding into them. Although on second thoughts maybe feeding
matter in isn't so important when the lifetime of the black hole is
so long, as is the case with our 6000K ones. It's only really
important to feed very small black holes that are otherwise likely to
evaporate away to nothing in unfortunate and unpleasant ways.
Rich
---David
They were apparently mentioned in _Battlefield Earth_, not
that I'd know. : )
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