The Black Hole Bomb and Black Hole Civilizations

Key Takeaways

black holes are the largest collections of pure violent energy in the universe if you come too close they'll devour you and add your energy to their collection and so the energy is lost to us forever or is it it turns out there's a universe cheek coat a way of powering civilizations until the very death of everything or of constructing the largest bomb in the universe but how didn't we learn that all energy is trapped forever in black holes even light this is true everything you think you know about the weirdest thing in the universe is about to get weirder for one simple reason black holes are [Music] spinning why black holes spin when really really massive stars die their CS collapse under their own gravity into black holes this means something very big becomes very very tiny like the tiniest anything can be in this universe but stars are rotating and a fundamental property of our universe is that things that are spinning don't want to stop spinning we call this angular momentum and this angular momentum can't go away a big thing that spins and becomes smaller spins faster so as the core of a star collapses its momentum makes it spin faster and faster and faster until it collapses into a black hole and the black hole keeps on spinning inconceivably fast some of them spin millions of times a second why spinning black holes are special just like non-spinning black holes spinning black holes have an event horizon and a singularity at their core where all of their mass is concentrated the sing ularity is usually described as a single infinitely small point with no surface area but points can't rotate so a rotating Singularity can't be a point instead it's a ring ority a ring ority is a ring with a thickness of zero and no surface spinning extremely fast containing all the mass of the black hole the black hole is spinning so fast that it morphs space and time itself it literally drags space with it such as its power this creates a new and super weird region of SpaceTime the erosphere which envelops the black hole if space and time are completely broken inside the Event Horizon then they're only half broken inside the ergosphere inside the ergosphere nothing makes sense it's possible to enter it and then leave it again but it's probably not a great experience you can imagine it like this falling into a static black hole is like sliding down a hole being inside the ergosphere of a spinning black hole is like spiraling down a deadly drain the black hole transfers its own kinetic energy in the form of rotation to everything that enters the ergosphere the regularity makes you dance whether you want to or not you need to move faster than the speed of light just to stand still here which is impossible but here's our cheat Cod we can steal this energy and there's a lot of energy to steal how to steal energy from a monster take the super massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way we could steal as much energy from it as every single star in the Milky Way emits in a billion years combined the easiest way to steal this energy is oddly enough to drop something into the black hole we've seen that the ring forces energy on us when we enter the ergosphere which is a lot like being in a world pool with SpaceTime rushing around and around if you're clever you can use the water to your advantage and swim faster than before in practice this means sending a rocket into the ergosphere and making a trade with the black hole we give it some mass energy and it gives us some of its rotational energy but it's not a fair trade we get the better deal normally if you fire a rocket you exchange chemical energy for kinetic energy this is like pushing yourself forward in a swimming pool but if you fire a rocket inside the ergosphere it's like pushing yourself forward in a wave pull the rotational energy of the Waves gives you a much stronger boost than you could get just by pushing yourself the Boost from the rotation of the black hole is so big that you leave the ergosphere with much more energy than you ented it the black hole gives a tiny amount of its rotational energy to you and slows down a little obviously this requires a lot of food fortunately black holes aren't picky eaters an advanced future civilization would probably Harvest asteroids to drop them into the black hole when they needed an energy boost but there's an even better way to get energy from a black hole and oddly enough it builds the biggest bomb any living thing could ever hope to build the black hole bomb we only need two things to build a black hole bomb a f spinning black hole and a big mirror the mirror has to completely envelop the black hole which is similar to a Dyson Sphere a mega structure that harvests the energy of an entire star Although our mirror would be easier to build mirrors are simpler and black holes are much much more compact than Stars if we made the mirror 10 cm thick the metal of a big asteroid would probably be enough material for a black hole with the mass of our sun once our error is in place we only need to open a window and shoot electromagnetic waves at the black hole you can imagine what happens next by imagining tossing a ball at a wall and it coming back faster than a bullet the waves hit the black hole at light speed a small proportion of the Waves Falls past the Event Horizon to disappear forever but a much larger amount soses through the ergosphere where the black hole forces some of its rotational energy on them and amplifies them they now begins super radiant scattering which are fancy science words meaning bouncing around between mirror and black hole and getting stronger every time they go around they are getting exponentially Stronger by opening some windows in the mirror we can extract the energy from the waves as fast as they grow which we could use in theory to create what would be for all practical purposes an endless source of energy for trillions of years or we could blow it up if the waves are not released they will continue to get stronger and stronger and take more and more energy from the black hole until the mirror shatters a super massive black hole would release as much energy as a supernova making the bomb the largest explosion any living being could ever create the last home in a dying Universe the beauty of the black hole bomb the Penrose process and the super radiant scattering is that they are not science fiction in the far far future this might be the only way to survive in our dying Universe after all the red dwarfs have cooled down and all the white dwarves transformed into black dwarfs the universe will turn dark forever rotating black holes might be the only sources of energy in the entire universe that life could Harvest if so the last living being in existence might One Day end its life around a black hole which is equally chilling and uplifting it turns out that even without any light there are places we can go