From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri May 17 2002 - 00:22:36 MDT
A question for all the astrophysicists, astrophysicists-*manque*, and
Carnotians out there--
But first, an expository lump:
Wei Dai said
>MBrains will want to be in stealth mode (envelop
>your star in a shell and dump waste heat into a black hole) and hide from
>each other.
I was charmed by this black hole idea, which I haven't seen before in quite
that form. It strikes me that one might prefer to have at least two holes
on orthogonal orbits, and a perfect mirror on the outer shell that would
reflect all and only incident stellar light and background radiation--but
enough with the pesky details. My question:
Is it terribly bad just to dump the degraded waste heat back on the central
star? It might burn faster, but that's all the more useful energy, no? and
you can always move, later on.
And is it in fact feasible to turn all your heat noise into, say, IR laser
light and beam it that accurately at black holes?
And does the hole just gulp everything down, grow minutely larger, and say
nothing? Or is there bound to be a radiating accretion disk slamming out
gamma and X-rays? Even if you were very neat? I reckon there'd be stray
gases leaking all over the joint.
Of course it's also most annoying when gravity-detecting explorers come
visit the anomaly in `empty' space, and smash right through the shell.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:09 MST