this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Us developing an actual black hole would be one of the best things humanity has ever done. It would kinda be like inventing techniques to make fire.
We could throw shit around the orbit of the black hole and get fusion. Not just deuterium fusion! Even proton proton fusion. Our energy needs would be solved practically forever.
We could conduct a crazy amount of experiments on the black hole, see quantum effects of gravity and whatnot.
Maybe we could build one of em Alcubierre drives that don't need exotic matter?
Can you imagine what a "black hole fusion accident" could look like?
No, of course not. The accident eats all the light I'd need for that.
I mean, you could imagine it for a moment.
Or would that mean that you can only imagine, because you could never truly observe it?
It would be almost impossible to do something like that without enough fuel though.
In theory you could collapse almost anything into a black hole, every piece of matter and energy has a roche limit
What is that limit for iron and is it referred to as Ferro-Roche?
There's definitely a paper in this idea
Pretty sure any black hole we create would evaporate from hawking radiation before it could be used for anything outside of research.
If we could make Jupiter a black hole, would that be stable enough to not radiate away? Other big body we have access to is the sun and I feel we would suffer more side effects of turning that into a hole compared to Jupiter
Should we be making any of these things a black hole?
Replacing Jupiter with an equally massive black hole shouldn’t make a difference. We’d only have one bright dot less in the night sky.
The sun is debatable, since I think we already use it's photons both for photosynthesis in plants, heat (although we could get infrared warmth from the hole) as well as other benefits
Why shouldn't we holify Jupiter? It would be a testament to our technological progress as well as helping us study black holes "close"ish by rather than in labs
Sometimes our technological progress makes us do things we think are a good idea at the time. Then like years, decades, centuries, millennia later we realize it was not such a good idea after all.
Scientists care too much about if we could, they forget to ask if we should.
I'm pretty sure if we made Jupiter a black hole we'd throw off our orbit and have much bigger problems.
Wouldn't a Jupiter-mass black hole have the same gravitational effects as Jupiter and absolutely nothing would be affected?
Yup
If you were very, very close to it, not exactly, since Jupiter's mass is more spread out, making the gravitational pull slightly weaker at close range. But for practical purposes yeah nothing would change for us other than space debris being flung around it instead of hitting it.
My point was more that we'd probably have to increase the mass to be able to make it a black hole, as we don't have the ability to compress it to a singularity.
Black holes aren't vacuums, nothing would change if the mass was equivalent
Yes, but you'd more than likely have to increase the mass of Jupiter to make it a black hole.
Yeah.
Then somebody drops it and it just falls down to the planet's core and eats our fucking world.
The way we are going, its for the best
I'm not saying we shouldn't do it.
That's not really how black holes work. They evaporate really quickly when they're small enough. And if they're small, they don't have much gravity either.
But it will still be pulled down by earth's gravity. And depending on the size, it's not going to just evaporate if it has a planet's gravity pushing rock and metal into it.
A high speed black hole would just punch through the earth, but if it just falls down, it would destroy the planet.
Ok, so even if it "falls down", it will probably evaporate way before it even reaches the center. Even if it doesn't, it will be take A VERY LONG TIME for it to get big enough to eat the planet out or whatever.
It is very VERY difficult to make something fall inside a black hole. Mostly, stuff just zooms right past it at incredible speeds.
The earth would be consumed by the sun way before it gets consumed by a black hole.
You're talking at scales where the incoming mass has a lot of velocity already. In a stationary frame of reference, the matter would more than likely fall directly in since there isn't an appreciable amount of rotational momentum involved like there is at stellar sizes.
That's not how that works. It's not a DnD sphere of annihilation, it's an infinitely dense point of matter.
That shrinks in a vacuum but grows as other matter gets too close. Matter such as "the earth". Explain how we're not fucked if it escapes from its magnetic vacuum suspension because Kevin accidently drops it.
One of the first things we will use it for is to make a new weapon of mass destruction. Mark my words.
It would make whoever controls it effectively God, so yeah - probably.
Tiny black holes are the kind of thing that physically cant exist for more than a few like picosecods or something ridiculous like that before evaporating into radio waves.
We kinda don't know for sure though. The tinier the black hole gets, the more it enters into the realm of quantum mechanics. We have no clue how quantum gravity works, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Unfortunately an Alcubierre drive dumps a shitload of high energy radiation in the direction of travel when it stops. We would sterilize every world we get to.
So why not just stop beside the planet you are aiming for?
Me travelling calmly through space when a rogue wave of high energy radiation blasts me from some rando warping 2974738 years ago
Wouldn't that be a non-issue? The radiation is going to be spreading out in a cone, not a focused laser beam. It should dissipate down to a level that a spaceships normal radiation shielding would already need to be able to handle pretty quickly.
Hmm, I think you're right
What about traveling slightly off axis? Could even tack back and forth.
Isn't that a solvable problem though? Overshoot the target planet by just enough, that it isn't in the hemisphere of the warp bubble pointed towards the direction of motion.
I think there was a Simpson’s episode about this.