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alienist comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.