wnoise comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Unnamed 01 April 2010 03:21PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (524)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Kutta 01 April 2010 08:16:33PM *  3 points [-]

PDF: "Are black hole starships possible?"

This paper examines the possibility of using miniature black holes for converting matter to energy via Hawking radiation, and propelling ships with that. Pretty interesting, I think.

I'm no physicist and not very math literate, but there is one issue I pondered: namely, how the would it be possible to feed matter to a mini black hole that has an attometer scale event horizon and radiating petajoules of energy in all directions? The black hole would be an extremely tiny target in a barrier of ridiculous energy density. The paper, as rudimentary it is, does not discuss this feeding issue.

Comment author: wnoise 01 April 2010 08:53:28PM 3 points [-]

I prefer links to the abstract, when possible.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803