Black Holes can swallow anything,
even light, and small black holes made from light itself may offer us abundant
clean energy and a pathway to the stars. Black holes are enormously massive and
dense objects, birthed in the wake of dying stars many times more massive than our
own, but that may not be the only way to create them. One option proposed is to create Kugelblitz
black holes, and while this originally referred to the suggested process for making them, it
has also come to mean a cla
ss of micro-black hole smaller than an atomic nucleus that
could be used for powering spaceships or even civilizations. While there are many ways a
black hole might be used for power generation, these very small ones offer the easiest and
most portable version, Hawking Radiation. Today we’ll be looking at the Kugelblitz Black
hole generation method, some variants on it, how that would function, how Hawking
Radiation works, what the scale of power generation and mass and lifetime would
be f
or these black holes, and many potential applications, advantages, and limitations.
If that sounds like fun, grab a drink and a snack, before a black hole snatches it from you, relax,
and please hit those like and subscribe buttons. Now Kugelblitz is the German word for ball
lightning and it is a pretty good pick for the concept. As everyone knows, black holes are
intensely massive objects and mass generates gravity. But in reality mass is just one type
of energy and other types of energy ge
nerate gravity. An object that is incredibly hot has
actually increased its gravitational pull over that same object if it were cold, and so
too, an object spinning very quickly has a lot of rotational energy and that adds gravity.
Indeed, most black holes have as much as 20% of their energy in rotational format. They are also
incredibly hot. But even photons generate gravity. Photons, the particles of light emitted by stars
and which cannot escape from a black hole’s event horizon, can be a
dded to a black hole and their
energy would add to its apparent total mass. In this same way, if we could manage to get a
whole bunch of photons in the same time and place, at a high enough density, we could have enough
energy there to generate an event horizon big enough to encompass them. And there is
no known bottom limit for a black hole, though we’ll discuss some possible limits later.
For any given amount of mass or energy there is a density it can be that if you crammed it down
woul
d form a black hole. The radius of black event horizon rises linearly with its mass or energy,
but volume rises with the cube of radius so that required density ends up inversely proportional
to the mass. Something ten times more massive only needs to be at one hundredth the density
to form a black hole, something a million times more massive only needs a trillionth of density.
As a result, you can make a black hole just by piling a lot of matter together that won’t fuse,
but we’re still tal
king masses larger than our sun even if we’re piling up iron in one big ball. Even
the big monster at the core of the galaxy composed of several million sun’s worth of matter is still
denser than steel by a couple orders of magnitude, though there are some black holes that are less
dense than thin air in the Universe at large. Trying to make one this way would seem
a bad approach, especially since we can move a naturally occurring black hole, they’re
actually amazingly efficient spaceship d
rives, though so massive it wouldn’t generally
be worth moving in favor of moving to. So instead we contemplate trying to
make one much smaller than a star, and that’s where we get into problems. Normally
a supernova occurs in the upper core of a star, blowing most of the matter there into space and
imploding all the inner core, now made of iron, into a very tiny ball. So dense that it can’t
even be iron anymore, or any atom, but instead has to be degenerate matter. Indeed it has to be
a l
ittle denser than even a neutron star, which is around ten trillion times denser than steel.
Normal matter doesn’t like being shoved together that tight, by which I mean fermions, which is
the class of particles that includes protons, neutrons, electrons, and everything made from
them, and are also named after physicist Enrico Fermi, from where we get the term Fermi Paradox.
Lots of things are fermions and indeed it even includes neutrinos and they barely interact with
anything. Untold numbe
r of neutrinos hit Earth every instant, in fact about 100 trillion hit
you every second, and yet only a handful would actually interact with any atoms while passing
through you or this planet. In the super-dense hearts of dying stars is one of the few places
things are dense enough that they tend to get absorbed. Which is how we get many heavy elements.
Stick enough neutrinos in one place and you’ve got a black hole, same for something else
weakly interacting like dark matter, which may or m
ay not be a fermion itself.
Neither is very easy to handle though, so we imagine a different option, bosons.
Bosons are a different category of particle and include photons of light, gluons, higgs bosons,
and even some particles made of a pair of quarks, instead of the three quarks protons and neutrons
are made from. What’s particularly interesting about bosons is that they don’t mind being in
the same place as each other. You can stack them up. Indeed when we talk about wavelength of
light
, you can think of that as the actual size of a photon of light, and counterintuitively
the more energy a photon has the smaller its wavelength. So gamma rays are basically on
the order of atomic nuclei while X-rays are more at the atomic and visible light we can see,
plus its neighbors in Ultraviolet and Infrared, as more on the size of molecules and cells.
Alternatively, a microwave photon is on the human scale and longer radio frequencies can even
be as big as a planet, while perversely h
olding virtually no energy, and even a normal gamma
ray photon might hold a billion-trillion times as much energy in something as small as an atomic
nucleus. Indeed, if we could arbitrarily generate a photon of whatever energy we wanted, you could
have one so short in wavelength and high in energy it would meet the qualifications to have an event
horizon and that is a notion that gets played with in some quantum gravity and cosmology discussion.
We talked about that more in our episode Thing
s Which Will Never Exist and generating such a
particle isn’t something we have an apparent avenue to, so we’ll leave that there for today.
But these bosons, whatever their energy and wavelength can all be in the same place at
once, intersect freely and keep on moving. Even with bosons there are some issues with
packing them too tight, which we’ll get to in a moment, but if we imagined some perfect
sphere of a mirror that let light of a certain wavelength in, but not back out, just like
a
black hole does, then we could pump that thing with energy until its energy density
tipped over the threshold to be a black hole. If we imagined we did that with a sphere half
a micron across, able to absorb blue light, which has a wavelength of about half a micron,
then all we would need to do is stuff in a lot of photons… 15 trillion-trillion-trillion joules
of energy worth in fact, which is roughly 1200 years of power production of our entire sun.
That would seem a little hard to pull off
but something like X-rays, at a thousand times the
energy and thousandth the wavelength of a blue photon, or even more, could cram into a smaller
spot and need only a thousandth the energy to do it. So basically, one year of solar production.
Channel regulars have probably heard me mention before that even civilizations that aren’t
interested in growing their population into the quadrillions might still build a Dyson swarm
for technologies like this and we’ll come back to why that might be
the case in a bit, but since
we do not have any 100% perfect one way mirrors, the idea is to try to time a lot of laser
blasts to arrive at the same place and time very accurately so that for that briefest
moment they are a big ball of energy. Hence the kugelblitz or ball lightning name.
To give some scale here, since light moves 300 million meters per second and in our blue
light case we were contemplating something half a millionth of a meter wide, the time a given
photon would be passing
through there is only a femtosecond, a millionth of a billionth of
a second, and the X-ray has to do even better, hitting a spot the size of an atom
that it passes through in a billionth of a billionth of a second, or an attosecond.
Needless to say, that’s quite a small window to be trying to dump the entire annual output
of the sun into and you presumably have to have mirror arrays able to bounce a beam of light
around without major dissipation for a full light year to get that entire annu
al solar output in one
spot at one instant. It’s a lot of energy too, but to think of it in terms of mass, that blue-light
kugelblitz black hole has a mass equivalent to a fifth of Ceres, the largest asteroid and one
so big we debate if it should be called a dwarf planet instead. While the mass energy of our X-ray
example would be on an order of 200 Mount Everests crammed into something the size of an atom.
They are also way too big to be of use to us for Hawking Radiation as Big Blue isn’t
even quite generating a single joule of energy in a whole year… it might be enough for
a post-biological and post-stellar civilization though, see our episode black hole farming for
details, though we’ll cover it a bit today too. The Atom X black hole could at least run an
LED light bulb we could see in a dark room. Not a lot of power but more importantly,
it is generating that power consistently for 7 billion-billion-billion
years, and Big Blue even longer. Only it isn’t consistent, as it
gives off power
it loses mass and generates more power. Any black hole, given a long enough time period, will
generate useful amounts of energy. Just don’t hold your breath, most wouldn’t do so for so long
a time that they’d view the entire history of our Universe from the Big Bang to the last Star as
less than a blink of an eye in very long life. We would love to create smaller black holes,
but you really can’t do one smaller than you can generate a beam for or make a material you
can re
flect, and since materials are made of multiple atoms, and gamma rays are smaller than
atoms, they don’t reflect well. As of the time of this writing, the smallest wavelength laser I’m
aware of is 0.15 nanometers, just a little smaller than our X-ray example, with a power output
of 35 milliwatts and working out to a mass of almost exactly 10^17 kilograms or 100 trillion
megatons. We’ll be using megatons and kilotons a lot in our discussion going forward but the key
thing here is that we can
’t really make this and use it for useful Hawking radiation, not unless
we want to wait a billion-billion-billion years. However it is a lot bigger than an atomic nucleus
so we could start feeding it matter and faster than it was oozing power out. Mind you, you have
to add the equivalent of a quarter of a billion neutrons or protons to this thing every second to
add mass faster than its losing but that should be possible given that a line of nucleons flying at
it at near light speed can sti
ll be spaced nearly a meter apart coming out of their cannon, and you
could have multiple beams on it and add more and speed it up as it grew. Though with the caveat
that even if you were feeding this at several hundred times its minimum feed rate you might need
longer than the universe has been around to get something big enough to feed matter in as fast
as you could want. But you could also just keep whatever beam you used to make it on it until
it got big enough to force feed normal matt
er. So, I would bump this into the category of
scientifically solid and engineering feasible, and it is why we spend a lot of time talking
about micro black holes on this channel, and indeed did a whole episode on black hole
technologies last month that wasn’t focused on hawking radiation black holes. Because a big
but tiny black hole the size of an atom can still generate power by other methods as can anything
bigger than that and much easier too. Time will tell if we can make and manipula
te higher-energy
beams to make even smaller black holes. Now what’s all this black
hole Hawking Radiation stuff? In that aforementioned episode I did cover the
virtual particle explanation in some detail, though we’ll go over it briefly today and we’ll
also give a non-virtual particle explanation. The very confusing thing about Hawking Radiation
for most folks is that smaller black holes give off much higher amounts of radiation.
As mentioned we did the virtual particle explanation in last
month’s episode on Black Hole
Technologies and the two paragraph summary of that is that the quantum foam everywhere in this
universe is constantly spawning huge quantities of virtual particles in pairs that self-annihilate.
The rate at which this happens is the same everywhere, near a big black hole or a small one
or inside your finger or thumb. And the energies involved are staggering and mind-boggling.
Sometimes the place they emerge though is where an incredible amount of force is at pl
ay
and one that varies heavily in strength even over subatomic distance. This can rip those two virtual
particles apart so they can interact with other particles or objects instead of annihilating.
This doesn’t happen simply by being near a big force field, Earth has a big gravity field but
the difference in strength from one kilometer to another is pretty minor, let alone from one
nanometer to another. It’s the sharp change in force that matters and so even big black holes
don’t cause this
effect much, only very small black holes and the smaller the better. It
can happen with other forces incidentally, such as the subatomic ones acting inside existing
nuclei, see our antimatter factories episode or Vacuum Energy episode for further discussion.
These virtual particles have a total of zero energy in the pair, so one contains negative
energy and over time, the black hole absorbs more of those negative energy particles and
loses masses, while emitting those positive energy photo
ns into the wider Universe.
That’s the virtual particle explanation and they are more of a calculation device than
a real object though the word ‘real’ is pretty ambiguous in cosmology and particle physics these
days. It is not correct and when folks think on it they start wondering why the quantum foam, which
constantly pops out brief-lived pairs of all sorts of particles, seems to be producing just photons
for Hawking Radiation and why negative energy photons are the ones falling in. There
’s no reason
that either should be true but Hawking used it as his original popular explanation for Hawking
Radiation, so it gets reused a lot. This irritates a lot of physicists, but I happen to agree with
Hawking that this is a simpler to explain and true enough version, which is why I often use it.
But this is a construct for explanation. Much as its energy, not just mass, that is warping
spacetime, it is that actual warped spacetime that’s emitting the Hawking Radiation.
The greater and
more severe that warping, the more energy can spill out of it. So, in
reality it is not the event horizon emitting the radiation, it’s that whole sharply curved
area, it just sharpens the closer you get to the horizon and beyond there too, but nothing
is emerging from inside that horizon. As this energy emerges from that warped spacetime region
several times larger than the event horizon, the overall warping decreases, resulting in the
mass or energy of that black hole decreasing. If you w
ant another version, then you may think
of that region very close to a black hole as being very hot. Think of how a metal bar heats up as
you bend it back and forth and imagine that for spacetime itself in that spot, it is tortuously
bent. This is how objects give off thermal light, in this case that spacetime itself
is so bent and hot that it does, and again it’s only the region safely out past
the event horizon that we can see that light from and it gets sharper and hotter as we approach.
If none of those worked as a good mental analogy, then I’ll simply say that the math demands
that the region right near a black hole emits radiation, and that the sharpness of that curving
matters way more than the size of the space being curved for how much radiation is emitted. So yes,
a neutron star would also emit Hawking Radiation, and so would a white dwarf, or even you or I.
But given that even a neutron star bends space less than a normal black hole and a normal
stellar mass black
hole’s bending near its event horizon is still so small it takes a
trillion-trillion-trillion-trillion-trillion years to leak most of its radiation out,
we can discard these all as meaningful producers of Hawking Radiation.
It also does mean that we could at least consider that since its really the
warped spacetime producing this effect, which we might think of a cracks in spacetime
letting vacuum energy leak out, that we could do this without mass, or even energy, if
we had someway to shar
ply bend spacetime without either. And the kugelblitz approach is
about doing it without mass, but with energy, and if we wanted to think of this as slicing a
hole through the universe with a very powerful laser into the true vacuum or pushing down on a
rubber sheet with it so that it slowly relaxes back to where it was,gradually emitting the energy
you bent that sheet with, those analogies seem as right as the virtual particle analogy Hawking
offers. I would be curious which if any you fou
nd most clear for the concept though, since I
must explain the idea a lot and without much math. So how tiny and compressed does spacetime need
to get to give us useful Hawking radiation? Well, that’s obviously a bit subjective, in a cold
post-stellar universe running on Landauer Limit calculation, a whole civilization might thrive
on a single watt of energy, see our civilizations at the End of Time series for further discussion.
And we might find a one-watt black hole useful for something
like a navigation beacon or to power a
low-energy device for 10 trillion-trillion years, about a trillion times longer than we expect
before the stars all stop forming and die off. That would mass 18.9 million megatons, and I’d
put this as the extreme edge of what anyone would bother making unless they were planning to live
off natural black holes when they evaporated, and they made a bunch of these to stagger their
lifetimes as a bridge to that period. This is also probably more than enoug
h to run a human level
emulation of a mind inside a virtual reality, offering them a lifetime of at least 10,000
trillion years, since they could certainly trickle feed particles in from a greater stockpile
to keep it running, as it is nearly atom sized. Beneath this, every kugelblitz is subatomic or
smaller. To go through scales of power briefly, by hundreds, a 100 Watt black hole masses
1.89 million Megatons and runs for 10 billion, trillion years, a 10,000 watt or 10 kilowatt black
hole
masses 189,000 megatons, and would live for 10 billion-billion years, and could easily run a
fairly lavish household that hole time. A megawatt black hole masses 18,900 megatons and could run
a small community for 10 quadrillion years. A 100-megawatt black hole would be 1890 megatons
and could replace most modern power plants for 10 trillion years, the period of time we think stars
will exist in this universe, while a 10 Gigawatt black hole, at 189 megatons could match the output
of our bi
ggest hydroelectric power plants and do it for 10 billion years, the lifetime of our Sun.
At this range we are getting black holes that could run real space habitats, and you may
have noticed that while the power output has been rising by a factor of a hundred each step,
the mass has been dropping by a factor of ten, and the lifetime by a factor of a thousand.
That’s because at each step you’ve got an object a tenth as big generating a hundred times
the power, and thus burning it out 10 time
s 100 or a thousand times faster. At each step our
mass has dropped by a factor of ten and so has the width of that black hole too. Although
there’s nothing black about these, as even our 1 watt example would be able to dimly light a
room – albeit it with soft X-rays not visible light – and it only gets worse from there as we
get into hard x-rays and then gamma rays. We can convert those x-rays into visible light, and same
for gamma, much as we do in nuclear power plants. If you’re curious,
you could have a black
hole that emitted a light spectrum similar to a normal star, it's just that it would
be at about the one-microwatt range so not very useful for lighting things, as 20
billion megatons isn’t exactly portable. Back to our powers of 10 wattage scale. Our next
step would be a trillion watts, or a terawatt, at 18.9 megatons, and this would comfortable run
even a full-scale island three O’Neill Cylinder complete with auxiliary facilities. And it will do
it for 10 million
years. I think your sweet spot for artificial habitats and space stations
is probably between here and our last step, the 10 billion year 10 gigawatt level. Note that
you can use anything in between or alternatively, just find your desired battery life and add
several of that size instead till you reach your power requirement. That’s not optimal
for a spaceship though and it's our next sizes that are in the top and bottom
mass and power ranges for a spaceship. At 1.89 megatons we have a bla
ck hole able to
produce 100 trillion watts of power and do so for 10,000 years. This is long enough to cross a
decent chunk of a galaxy but wouldn’t be enough for a trip across the entire galaxy or to a
neighboring galaxy, where the 10-million-year duration terawatt black hole might be needed
instead. Of course, you could feed a smaller one to keep it alive but that is just as precise
as making one and you’re trying to stuff particles of fuel into a black hole just 5 billionths
of a nanome
ter wide at this point which is simultaneously emitting as much energy as the Sun
shines down on the whole state of Texas at noon. I’m not sure how you could get anything
in there that was a normal bit of matter, and you might be limited to feeding it something
very non-interacting like dark matter at this point. Think of a more normal scale black hole
as a big pond or lake, it’s very easy to throw a stone into one and even if it skips it's going
to fall in after that. At some point this tu
rns into you trying instead to throw a rock into
a firehose while it’s on, hard but possible, maybe you need to fire a bullet from a gun to
feed instead, and beyond that we get to the point where we can’t feed matter into one at all.
You could conceivably pull over at an inhabited solar system with a giant power collector
array that could force feed your black hole with an x-ray laser or maybe gamma rays, but
now it's basically a battery for recharging, not a ship drive you could dump
more
matter into from a supply. Our 1.89 megaton black hole at 100 terrawatts is
quite an impressive ship, in that the black hole alone masses as much as 20 aircraft carriers,
and the rest of the ship is presumably in that general size range, so this works great
for space freighters and colony arkships. Most often when folks talk about wanting to
use kugelblitz black holes this way though, they are thinking something more in the 0.189
megaton or 189 kiloton range, which produces 10 petawatts and
that’s enough to comfortably light a
continent…. Though again it being gamma rays means it’s enough to easily sterilize a continent.
This black hole lasts about ten years and is half of a billionth of a nanometer across. And is
allowing ships the size of a modern oil tanker to cross an interstellar void and at a high fraction
of light speed, to the nearest neighboring star. You want, for course, a smaller ship like the
Millenium Falcon on the order of tens of tons or even maybe a kugelblit
z black hole running
your power armor, and an 18.9 kiloton black hole produces a billion gigawatts of power for
half a week, enough to light a handful of Earths, while a 1.89 kiloton black hole, at 100 billion
gigawatts, last just 5 minutes. A 189 ton black hole, at 10 trillion gigawatts, would shine
as brightly as a dimmer red dwarf star but only for a third of a second. One as bright as
our own sun and as massive as a large tractor at 18.9 tons would live only 300 microseconds.
As a siden
ote, I tend to be dubious if objects in this scale or much smaller but more energetic
can really exist, though I’m no cosmologist. Given that the upper end for the theoretical maximum
of vacuum energy is on an order of about 10 Joules for one cubic femtometer, then by the
time we get to our 189-ton black hole, this is trying to emit more than a billion-trillion
joules of energy from a region more than a billion-billion times smaller than a femtometer
or atomic nuclei. That would tend to imp
ly a throughput or complete refresh rate of something
just above a Planck Time, roughly 10^-43 seconds, which is what we usually say is the hard
limit of the minimum time any action can occur in. There’s no half a Planck time.
So I think at this point we can say that even if you somehow managed to get around all the
creation and feeding issues, you’ve reached a hard limit on how small things are getting here where
we definitely move into the Clarketech range. No man-portable black hole gener
ators unless
you’ve also got some method of anti-gravity or nullifying inertia, which might also allow
some interesting approaches to energy creation. Some make a case there’s also a hard limit at
about 10^16 kilograms or 10 million megatons, which has a power output of 3.56 watts and a
lifetime of 1.47 billion, trillion years. That’s just over the threshold from soft x-rays to hard
x-rays at 4145 eV or 0.3 nanometers wavelength and thus is something we can comfortably work with.
That valu
e of 10^16 kilograms as a minimum is a number I encountered back when folks were trying
to argue if the Large Hadron Collider was going to produce a black holethat would eat Earth, though
any black hole of that scale or smaller would take far longer to naturally eat this planet than it
would live, the planet or the black hole. When you’re trying to swallow an atom with a mouth
smaller than one, and you need to eat untold billions of them a second to even eat a planet
over a trillion years,
you have a constraint there that even Pacman couldn’t overcome.
If you can’t feed these things normal matter, then they need to be regarded as batteries,
something civilizations do with a thin-Dyson swarm of power collectors around their sun to store
energy for the ultra-long term. They might be the ultimate commodity currency for civilizations
too, the sorts of things you store in bank vaults at the center of artificial planets.
For the purpose of artificial planets, when you just want mass,
you probably still would
rather use several smaller ones than one big one, which would mean placing them either in a magnetic
field so they didn’t merge or putting them in something like a Klemperer Rosette configuration.
Even the biggest of these is so tiny, and carries so much inertia, that they aren’t going to be
accidentally knocked of course by accidents, so storing them safely is a lot easier
than antimatter and they have the same energy density but can only be released at a
certain
rate. Though if you have truly good gamma-reflective mirrors you could, in theory
anyway, throttle a feedable kugelblitz black hole by reflecting some of its energy back into it.
Let’s go over some other interesting sizes and applications, and thanks to my friend Bob Fowler
for the chart he sent me that contained a lot of specific interesting black hole values I
hadn’t thought of. For spherical planets generating natural gravity equivalent to Earth’s,
their land area is proportional to thei
r mass, twice the land area of Earth, twice
the mass, a thousandth the land area, a thousandth the mass. And similar, the amount of
light they need to stay warm and comfortably lit scales proportional to land area or mass in this
case. You need something like one watt of sunlight for every 25 million kilograms of planet mass.
For a micro-planet with something like Earth gravity and Lighting supplied by that black
hole, or by light generated from that powerplant, your scale is around 10^13 ki
lograms, a little
over a trillionth of earth’s mass, or a 3.56 megawatt black hole, to potentially as high as
one trillionth of an Earth mass at 10 megawatts, it would depend on how efficiently you
generated power, turned it into light, and how close to Earth normal light and gravity
you wanted. Their lifespan is on an order of a quadrillion years, so decently longer than the
universe will be old when the last stars die. This would generate you about a trillionth the
land area Earth has, o
r a millionth is radius, about 6 meters or 30 feet, just 500 square meters
or 5500 square feet, or an eighth of an acre, in spherical format. This also means the
gravity in your basement level is a lot higher than in your second story. Now you wouldn’t
build a planet this small, but you might use hundreds of black holes in this mass range
to make a microplanet dozens of times wider, or keep piling them in to get even bigger. But
a pico-Earth mass black hole is probably your minimum mass art
ificial planet building block.
You can also give artificial gravity to large flat regions of low gravity bodies, for
something like a spaceport, by laying a bunch of these out in some 2D hexagonal
arrangement, magnetically held in place, and that provides gravity and power and again on a
timeline of a quadrillion years. Also at the high end of what you really want in terms of regular
power generation for a civilization because once you start getting to energy levels stronger
than sunlight y
ou start getting heat issues. So while you might want some smaller and more
powerful black holes for running something specific like a space cannon or spaceship
launcher, your own civilization on that moon or asteroid cannot really benefit from a higher
energy density than this without melting, same reason we wouldn’t expect folks to bother with
fusion reactors in the inner solar system around Mercury or Venus, the local sunlight is already as
energy dense as what they can use on their ship
or habitat so any reactor is like running your dryer
in the summer with the air conditioner on instead of a clothesline, sometimes more practical
but never really ideal under engineering. A rotating habitat would seem easier than this
black hole hexagonal plating, or grav plating, but may be higher maintenance and more importantly,
if your civilization is dumping all your sun’s excess energy into kugelblitz black holes to use
trillion or quadrillions of years down the road, you do need to
stores those and you might as
well make use of their gravity in the meantime. I don’t know if we’ll ever make
kugelblitz black holes a reality, I’m not sure our science is solid enough on black
holes and quantum gravity to really speak with any certainty on their function or creation, but
if we can make them, and given how easy doing a tinfoil thick power collector Dyson swarm is,
relatively speaking, I think kugelblitz black hole creation is what you would do with all
of a star’s excess p
ower generation until your population and demand there grew to reach that.
In the end, it will all depend on how small a black hole you could make and also how
small a black hole you can feed, because the latter is always the control on using them for
Hawking Radiation Spaceships. As we discussed, no matter what, black holes are likely to
play a huge role in our future civilization, but if we can make subatomic kugelblitz black
holes function, they are likely to become the go-to for both ene
rgy storage and power creation,
and possibly the gold standard of the future when it comes to interstellar banking.
Time will tell if it is possible or not, but the neat thing about even small black holes
is that they tend to be around for a long while, even compared to the stars themselves, and
so would the civilizations that used them. While producing this episode I got asked about
making computers from black holes and we’ll be having one of our weekly shorts on the topic in a
few days, b
ut I’ve mentioned in some of our more existential episodes that you can build a computer
of out all sorts of things, be it black holes or ants pushing grains of food around. If you can
make a switch out of something, you can make a computer, and if you’re looking for a fun example
of that, there’s Upper Story’s award-winning game Turing Tumble, that lets you build a computer
that runs on marbles instead of electricity. It is a great game and my kids instantly
fell in love with it too. Turin
g Tumble, named for the great Alan Turing who helped
us invent computers, is a fascinating and intuitive way to learn and hands-on experiment
with the fundamentals of computing. It also comes with a wonderful graphic novel that
gives you a story and presents you dozens of different challenges and switch diagrams to try,
before modifying and experimenting on your own. Computers don’t have to be a black box with
mysterious workings inside - unless they are made of black holes of course - chec
k out Turing Tumble
at upperstory.com/turingtumble to see why it won Parents Choice Gold Award, Astra Best Toy for
Kids Award, Toy of the Year Finalist, and the Dice Tower Seal of Excellence. Again, you can learn
more about Turing Tumble and see it in action at upperstory.com/turingtumble Use the coupon code
ISAACARTHUR for 10% off your total purchase. So that’s it for today and this weekend we’ll
close out the month with a look at multi-planetary empires, on Sunday, March 31st, to explore
what
nations controlling several worlds might actually be like and how they’d function. Then we’ll start
April off on the 4th with a discussion of space based solar power and several other clean energy
options from space that might be able to help us power not only our orbital infrastructure, but
Earth itself, including options like Earth’s own magnetic field. Then on the 7th will return to the
Fermi Paradox to ask if the reason why we don’t see expanding alien civilizations is because they
eat their own colonies, in the Cronus Scenarios. If you’d like to get alerts when those and other
episodes come out, make sure to hit the like, subscribe, and notification buttons. You
can also help support the show on Patreon, and if you’d like to donate or help in other ways,
you can see those options by visiting our website, IsaacArthur.net. You can also catch all of SFIA’s
episodes early and ad free on our streaming service, Nebula, along with hours of bonus content
like Crystal Alien
s, at go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. As always, thanks for watching,
and have a Great Week!
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