[LINK] "A Universe Optimized for Starships?"

[rfmcdonald]

Centauri Dreams lets us know that some people want to use black holes to drive starships.

Working with colleague Shawn Westmoreland, Crane has been exploring a different and far more speculative option for upping the energy extraction levels. What about using black holes for propulsion? Specifically, Crane and Westmoreland ask whether Hawking radiation from black holes can power a starship, calculating that a black hole of about a million tons would be just the right size, small enough to generate the needed Hawking radiation, while large enough to survive for the duration of a century-long star crossing. Adam Crowl has written fascinatingly about this in Crowlspace.

Crane and Westmoreland’s paper on using Hawking radiation for this purpose has been kicking around on the Net for a bit, never quite making it to the top of the queue here, but Marcus Chown gives it a good look in the latest New Scientist, so let’s pause to examine it now. Rather than finding a nearby black hole, the two suggest using a gamma ray laser powered by solar energy to create one. The energy needed would be enormous, calling for solar panels 250 kilometers across in close solar orbit, a Robert Forward-esque engineering challenge.

But if you could create such solar panels and let them soak up the needed sunlight to power up your black hole production facility, you’d wind up with something tiny that offered tremendous power. Says Chown:

The resulting million-tonne black hole would be about the size of an atomic nucleus. The next step would be to manoeuvre it into the focal range of a parabolic mirror attached to the back of the crew quarters of a starship. Hawking radiation consists of all sorts of species of subatomic particles, but the most common will be gamma ray photons. Collimated into a parallel beam by the parabolic mirror, these would be the starship’s exhaust and would push it forward.

[. . .]

Crane and Westmoreland think a starship powered this way could accelerate to close to the speed of light in a few decades, fast enough that relativistic time dilation would occur and vast distances could be crossed by human crews. Interestingly, a black hole starship like this should create gravitational waves that might be detectable here on Earth, assuming some nearby extraterrestrial civilization were using the technology. If coalescing black holes and neutron stars ought to be producing low-frequency gravitational waves, a black hole starship should leave a gravitational signature at ultra-high frequencies.

All I'll say is that Star Trek has established that some Romulan starships use quantum singularities to generate power. It's always slightly worrisome when scientists and thinkers imagine semi-plausible pathways to Trek technology, don't you think?