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Comment by kafkaesq | Hacker News Reader

So if, hypothetically, dark matter had some detrimental effect in those parts of the universe where it appears in overly high concentrations (making the universe less "interesting" in those parts... less able to produce life-bearing planets, say) --

-- then black holes would, in effect, be (our) universe's GC mechanism. Or at least, its "janitors" in some form.

Pretty cool.

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Except they don't relinquish what they gobble up, so they're not making a finite resource (memory) available for re-use, they're a total resource sink.

Whether that's ’cool’ or not is a matter of persona preference.

Don't black holes emit radiation or something?

Hawking radiation, yes. They eventually evaporate.

Hawking radiation is speculation AFAIK, there's no observation to back it up.

Some light reading on it:

https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/first-observation-...

OP isn't wrong. That we haven't proven the existence of Hawking Radiation is the only reason why Hawking hasn't won a Nobel.

No, just some light reading where we have reason to believe it has been observed and may be able to devise further methods to observe it.

I don't dispute that. I think the consensus has accepted Hawking radiation as real ... but we haven't seen evidence yet (and we may never, your link notwithstanding, given how tiny the effect is).

You're leaving out quasars.

I thought quasars still aren't relinquishing anything, the jets are matter that never made it past the event horizon.

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