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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Depends. Do we know how to obtain a miniature black hole?

There have been several proposals. This paper proposes a feasable mechanism[1]:

-"a SBH could be artificially created by firing a huge number of gamma rays from a spherically converging laser. The idea is to pack so much energy into such a small space that a BH will form."

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803

The biggest problem is that if you're creating it with lasers, you're only going to get the energy out that you put in. You really want to be able to feed it matter, which would effectively make it an anything-to-gamma-radiation converter, which means you have to feed it quite a lot of matter, against the radiation pressure of all that energy coming out. The paper mentioned assumes a worst case of not being able to feed the black hole at all, but doesn't (in my skim) address the fact that this means you have to put in all the energy you'll be using for the lifetime of the black hole at the creation of it, which seems significantly more outrageously infeasible than the bare necessity of creating a black hole at all.

Does anyone address the fact that a black hole will be falling towards the center of the earth at 1g? How do you handle a black hole?

Black hole is the safest energy generator per unit of energy produced.

Use it for interstellar spacecraft, as far away from Earth as possible.

There’s a recent paper on the formation of such a “kugelblitz”; it’s argued to be unfeasible.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02389

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