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Comment by readyplayernull | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't we be looking for civiliations near black holes? Time dilation, which makes time pass slower when closer to the black hole, would result in a relatively "longer living" universe, and there's plenty of free energy and materials to harvest, and also the BH would be a natural trash can, basically solving all the energy/production/disposal/time-span problems of any civilization.

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This thread must have at least one A Fire Upon the Deep reference, so I'll do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep

Edit: tldr; Vernor Vinge, the guy who originally coined the phrase "the singularity", wrote a really excellent SciFi novel about information archaeology, artificial intelligence, galaxy-spanning civilizations, black holes, and all sorts of other dope ish.

Just finished that book last night. Highly recommend, its incredibly original.

Or The Opoponax Invasion.

This is one of my favourite sci-fi books.

Thank you for the recommendation. Growing up I was a big fan of John Brosnan's trilogy Sky Lords - post apocalyptic / genetic wars sci-fi with zepellins - what is there not to like :).

Seeing this is by Brosnan as well means it's an instant buy for me.

I know Brosnan because my initial meeting with hard sci-fi was by reading a Polish magazine about sci-fi which printed one of his stories. Good times.

He was a great author and I'm sad that he will not write any more stories .. he is unfortunately dead.

I found his books (which IMO are not that famous) because our local library had them. Otherwise I don't think I would have stumbled upon it.

Same applies to Walter Jon Williams and his Hardwired which was one of my early favorites. I was amazed to find out later that this book is one of inspirations for Cyberpunk tabletop games and Cyberpunk 2077.

Totally unrelated, I had hoped "ish" died. For the unaware, the youths 10 years ago were using that as a substitute for "shit." It is a dumb new word because it already exists and means "approximately" or "slightly" as a suffix. So dopish is slightly dopey (slow/dumb). Yes, I subscribe mostly to words evolving. I don't like this case specifically. </tangent>

Ha! Intellectually I completely agree. This particular term has recently worked its way back into my social circle's lexicon because we all have young kids and are trying to swear less. I'm not sure I have ever used it in writing before, and I guess I never will again!

sorry; you do you. I just couldn't help it :p

Wouldn't it result in a relatively shorter living universe, since they'd be watching the rest of the universe speed by?

Completely unrelated, but what blossomed in my mind reading your comment was the brief synopsis of a race of beings close enough to a black hole that it significantly began to alter the likelihood of them facing conditions no longer compatible with life and the stories of what life would look like for these societies.

If you expect any outside civilizations might be hostile, wouldn't a slower frame of reference magnify the risk, both in terms of giving slower civ a disadvantage in adaptation/response times if any conflict did occur, and also in giving the faster frames more time to spawn hostile civilizations?

It probably depends what the limits of physics actually are. If interstellar war is actually practical given the laws of nature, you might be worried about such things. Otherwise, doesn't matter.

Weapons and soldiers would be entering the same time frame, so they would have similar response times.

park your army away from the black hole and build up your weapons and drones before the battle. you could build up resources at speeds orders of magnitude greater than the black hole civ

If hostiles were conquerors, I’d think they’d send waves of robot-weapons, with extra time to make/improve successive waves.

If they were annihilists, I’d think they’d send relativistic projectiles.

The radiation from an active black hole would sterilize most anything.

Thick radiation shielding?

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/parker-solar-probe/in-...

Seems really inconvenient to have to build your entire civilization with thick radiation shielding in mind

If the power you derive from having access to all the resources around a black hole is large enough it could pay for a really big shield.

Iirc if you get close enough to a black hole for time dilation to be substantial, then things are going to be pretty inhospitable in other ways. We couldn't survive the gravitational field gradient, for example. Strong imagination required to imagine aliens that would cope with it.

This idea is perpetuated by Isaac Arthur who assumes any such civilization will be digital with only their computers and automatons required to sustain them existing in the physical realm.

Isn't it the case that time goes faster under high gravity? Based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg that would seem to be the case.

I think the high speed there is due to the neutronium, not due to general relativity.

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