![]() The Ur-Example is the asymptotic drives in Imperial Earth by Arthur C.They generate the immense amounts of power that their civilization needs with stellar-scale artificial black holes. The Thuriens take it to a higher level, using the spinning singularities to create portals through space and time large portals to carry people and ships, or tiny portals to carry information and power. The Ganymeans in The Giants Series use spinning artificial singularities to power their ships.In Race Across Spacetime, the Core AIs are shown dumping stars into Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way, to power massive computers for complex calculations.The Intrepid Space Force adapts the DMG to run on vacuum energy instead, enabling them to be mounted on their own I-class motherships. The second time a DMG emplacement is encountered, damage from the Transcend Space Force's counterattack causes it to break loose, eat the moon, and enter a decaying orbit around the planet. The problem is, they require so much energy that they have to be fixed into a hollowed-out moon so that they can be powered by a captured singularity. DMGs emerge during the Orion War as a Wave-Motion Gun capable of overwhelming the ISF's formerly invulnerable stasis shields.The brown dwarf had been artificially inflated with gravity fields to generate helium-3 for fusion fuel, but the protagonists remark that the Bollers could actually get more energy by harnessing the new black hole as a power source. Shenanigans involving an Earth-Shattering Kaboom result in a brown dwarf in the Bollam's World System being compressed into a black hole by a massive fusion explosion. The prospect of generating energy with black holes is brought up several times in Aeon 14.In which case, this overlaps with Nature Is Not a Toy.Ĭompare Our Wormholes Are Different, Spaceship Slingshot Stunt, and Gravity Master for other ways black holes could be put to use. Additionally, things typically will Go Horribly Wrong if the black hole breaks free of any confinement used (for example, if it's a microsingularity housed within a Space Station or Cool Starship), or the infrastructure that harvests energy is damaged and begins to fall in. Of course, this is all dependent on a civilization having developed technology that can withstand the extreme conditions near the event horizon, which include massive gravitational and radiation effects and Time Dilation. Softer sci-fi tends to handwave it or cite technobabble such as The Power of the Void. A black hole can be used as a Reactionless Drive for a spacecraft by placing it in the intended direction of travel so that it pulls the ship along behind it.(In practice, the universe is not yet cool enough for this form of decay to be possible.) Black holes that are not fed will slowly evaporate in the form of Hawking radiation, which could theoretically be captured.Spinning black holes produce rotational energy that can be extracted.Black holes have magnetic fields that can be harnessed to generate power.This can be captured and turned into useful forms. Energy is released from matter as it falls into a black hole from the accretion disc.Harder science fiction will typically rely on one or more of the following real-world theories: A future space civilization is likely to take advantage of black holes around the tail end of the dying universe when there's no more stars to use. Supermassive black holes in particular, when fed a lot of matter, have the potential to outshine entire galaxies.Įven black holes themselves give off their own energy known as Hawking Radiation, which, in layman's terms, is the result of black holes slowly evaporating over inconceivably-long time scales of over 10^64 (that's 64 zeros) years on average due to quantum effects near the event horizon. When matter falls into a black hole, tidal forces stretch and heat up the material to extremely hot temperatures which gives off potent x-rays. Even though black holes are famous for not allowing even light to escape, this is only true if light enters the event horizon: their accretion disks are capable of producing light as long as there's a constant source of matter feeding them. In reality, black holes are actually the most powerful sources of energy in the universe, even more so than stars themselves. While it is popularly believed that black holes are like giant vacuum-cleaners in space, it is not actually completely true that anything that falls into a black hole is lost forever. Star Trek: The Next Generation Writers' Technical Manual, Season 4 edition, on the Romulan D'Deridex-class warbird
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