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alienist comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong
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When you're sufficiently advanced, cooling your systems, technically disposing of entropy, is one of the main limiting constraint on your system. Also if you throw matter into a black hole just right you can get its equivalent (or half its equivalent I forgot which) out in energy.
Edit: thinking about it, it is half the mass.
Not in useful energy, if you're thinking of using Hawking radiation; it comes out in very high-entropy form. I was so sad when I realized that the "Hawking reactor" I'd invented in fifth grade would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
I wasn't talking about Hawkings radiation. If I throw matter in a black hole just right, I can get half the mass to come out in low-entropy photons. That's why the brightest objects in the universe are black holes that are currently eating something.
Ah, cool! Forgot about how quasars are hypothesized to work.
It is useable if you use small blackholes. You don't need to be able to use all of the energy for lots of purposes since a tiny bit of mass leads to so much energy.