From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri May 17 2002 - 01:57:44 MDT
On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 04:22:36PM +1000, Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> 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.
The problem is that you would need to pay energy costs to heat up the
star (moving heat from somewhere cold to somewhere hot), so it would be
very inefficient. As the star heats up, it will tend to expand to remain
in equilibrium. This will decrease the rate of fusion in the core, so
its energy production will become less.
> 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?
Entropy is nasty; lasers can't transmit much entropy (and producing them
causes plenty of entropy). I think a better idea would be to have a
spherical cavity surrounding the hole, perhaps connected to it by some
electromagnetic fields.
> 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.
If you dump mattern, yes, then you get the fireworks. So you want to do
it only by electromagnetic radiation.
BTW, if you are paranoid about detection, then you want to place the
hole orbits in such a way to minimize gravity wave emission. I'm not
certain orthogonal orbits is the best solution for that. One
possibilitiy is to keep a lot of holes in the same orbits like pearls on
a necklace; that ought to excite only very high multipole modes that
should be hard to detect.
> Of course it's also most annoying when gravity-detecting explorers come
> visit the anomaly in `empty' space, and smash right through the shell.
Better try to set up some multicultural warnings a la those suggested
for nuclear waste sites - bulbous, pastel colored structures to remind
one of protoplasmic dissolution, heavy gold objects to demonstrate
"nothing valuable here" and maybe a few sample black holes.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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