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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

Is there any way we could build a miniature black hole in a lab?

Yes, but it's not terribly useful. It was theorized that the LHC could possibly generate a micro black hole that caused a bit of brouhaha, but it turns out they evaporate exponentially faster as they get smaller. (This is due to the surface area being more domininant as the volume shrinks.) So the damn things just evaporate before they get to any detecting equipment.

Of course, if we could make bigger ones, well, that'd take some significant mass, and at that point you'll have some rather impressive innovations in crushing stuff. (After all, particles are darn near point masses already, but crushing matter down past neutronium is gonna be hard.)

A particularly off-the-wall paper proposed firing a lot of X-ray lasers simultaneously into the same point to generate black holes. Photons being bosons, all you need is several million tons mass-energy equivalent occupying the same few cubic femtometers...

> It was theorized that the LHC could possibly generate a micro black hole that caused a bit of brouhaha...

Reminded me of this:

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JYkMhQ9gf8

Hahaha! Oh, shit. I'd forgotten all about that clip. A masterpiece.

It might always be a lot easier to find one and two it, than it will be to manufacture one in terms of total energy output. Imagine a far future with mature gravitational and neutrino astronomy, and good AI. You could send a fleet of drones to search for black holes that met your criteria, establish orbit, then send for help from a "tug".

The biggest use for a black hole would be dropping garbage into it and harvesting some of the energy.

It might be just what we need to power an Alcubierre drive. I'd probably want them to research this kind of energy source for at least 200 years before trying something like that, though. We wouldn't want to wipe out the solar system by accident.

"We wouldn't want to wipe out the solar system by accident."

I'm totally with you there. If we are going to do it we should be doing it on purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship

Potentially useful even if Alcubierre drives turn out to be impossible after all.

How... how in the name of Science are you supposed to keep track of an attometer-wide object?! The dang thing would be so easy to lose I imagine that misplacing the drive would be the biggest problem such a ship would have! We always imagine spaceships with these brilliant, impressive reactors and drives, and here's one that is so underwhelming it may as well not be there. (Save for the petawatt energy flowing off it...)

Well, it's not that hard to keep track of an atomic nucleus. I suppose you charge the thing up and manipulate it with electromagnetic fields.

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