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Kaleigh Thaxton
Professor Reily
English Composition II
1 July 2019
Powering our world- Black holes

Stephen Hawking once said that he thought all information was destroyed in black

holes and that was his biggest blunder, or at least his biggest blunder in science. There were

many scientists that thought black holes only destroyed things around them, Stephen being

one of them, but that was soon proved wrong in later years. On October 23, 2001, a black

hole was seen, for the first time giving, off energy (Nagaraja). This being said, there are

endless possibilities for our future. I believe that black holes could be used as energy sources

in the next one-hundred-thousand years. Some questions we must ask to obtain this is, what

is a black hole and how does gravity affect it? What are some ways this could be made

possible? And last, of all how will that affect our life on Earth.
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Fig. 1: The first ever picture of the black hole. (“How They Took the First Picture of a

Black Hole”)

First, what is a black hole? A black hole is where gravity is so intense that nothing

leaves; not even light can escape a black hole. A star will curve and misconstrue spacetime

near it, the more compressed and massive the star gets. In the event, that a monstrous star

that has consumed its nuclear fuel, cool and shrinks underneath a basic size, it will make an

unlimited opening in spacetime. This is how a black hole is made. John Wheeler gave black

holes the name “black holes.” He was also one of the first people to recognize its importance.

A black hole has a thing called an event horizon, which would be its boundary. It is

the place gravity is sufficiently solid to pull in light and keep it from getting away. Everyone

once thought that nothing could escape a black hole. Stephen Hawking later found that

particles leak out of them. The reasoning for this is that on a small-scale, things are fuzzy.

This is summarized in uncertainty relation. Which says the more precisely you know the

position of a particle the less you know of its speed. That goes for the opposite way as well.

For example, if the black hole was smaller, you know the position more accurately this

would mean that the speed would be uncertain. It could even be faster than the speed of light,

which would allow it to escape the black hole. But, the bigger the black hole, the more

uncertain the position is. This would cause its speed to have a smaller chance at be slower

than the speed of light. “A black hole of the mass of the sun, would leak particles at such a

slow rate, it would be impossible to detect.” (Stephen)

As every one of these particles are getting away from the dark gap loses its mass and

shrinks. This will increase the rate of emission of particles. The radiation is emitted very
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slowly from the black hole. Phillip Ball states “Might it be possible to induce a black hole to

release all its Hawking radiation sooner, so that in effect it becomes like a ball of fuel?”

But, how does gravity come into all of this? Gravity is one of the most important

factors in black holes. Since that is a part of what they actually are. A black hole is where

gravity is so strong it lets nothing leaves, not even light. For example, Earth’s gravity traps us

and we have to travel at a certain speed to escape it. This would be precisely eleven

kilometers per second. Black holes are the same, but you have to travel faster than the speed

of light to escape them.

We cannot just use any ol’ black hole. It has to be a certain size. The bigger the black

hole the smaller amount energy we will have. Scientist have been on the lookout for

miniature black holes. This will be ideal for getting energy from them. This is because they

are more condensed, and we can accurately locate the energy. Finding any miniature black

holes are going to take a long time since they probably existed in the earlier years of life.

What does that mean for using black holes as energy? While on the search for the

Goldilocks of sizes of black holes, we could make our own. Sometime in twenty-sixteen,

physics made a black hole to prove that Hawking radiation was real. So, why could we not

use this for gathering energy to power the world? It would be extremely hard to do this

without destroying the world entirely.

Say we could get the contained black hole, how would we go about getting its

energy? Well there are two physicists in nineteen-eighty-three, that suggested lowering an

energy-collecting device. Those physicists were named George Unruh and Robert Wald. This
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energy-collecting device can be thought of it like a box, for capturing radiation. They would

“dip” the bucket into the event horizon, so it could fill up with Hawking radiation. Then

repeat that over and over again.

This performed repeatedly, this maneuver would gradually strip the black hole of its

radiation. “Unruh and Wald estimated that in principle more energy can be extracted per

second from a single black hole than is radiated from all the ordinary stars in the observable

universe.” (Phillip Ball) You would need a pretty strong rope and box.

But there is a problem with this mechanism. Adam Brown of Princeton Center for

Theoretical Science says that it all lies within the mechanics of the rope holding the box.

Since it would be in a gravitational field, the rope would be under a constraint that it cannot

hold more than its own weight. For instance, a rope hanging down in Earth's gravity, the

rope's pressure increments with stature, since it is pulling a greater amount of its fair share. It

is distinctive with spacetime itself is very bent, the strain remains no different not relying

upon its height. Brown’s calculations show that the rope can only support its own mass. This

is meaning that it cannot carry its weight and the box’s.

Another restriction that there is, it is with the rope again. That is that the rope cannot

disintegrate. The closer you get to the event horizon the hotter the atmosphere is. If the rope

is lowered too much into the radiation, the more likely it is to melt. The lighter the rope is the

more likely it is going to melt; this is also on top of getting too close to the event horizon.
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Lastly, there is another restriction on this theory. Brown says the box itself will have

to be tiny. If it is not it will be pulled away from the rope. This would cause the rope to

eventually break. The box would have to be no bigger than a typical bacterium.

To abridge this all, if you get near the black hole the rope could break or liquefy. On

the off chance that the rope is made too gigantic to even consider avoiding melting, it may

crumble on itself. On the off chance that you attempt to go at a much wary separation, there

is not much Hawking radiation making little no vitality. “And Brown shows that even the

best compromise makes energy extraction much slower than Unruh and Wald suggested.”

(Phillip Ball)

There is another marginally better way to collect this Hawking radiation. This is do

without the box entirely. In nineteen-ninety-four, Albion Lawrence and Emil Martinec

proposed that you could simply dip “strings” into a black hole and let Hawking radiation run

up the string. This approach was thought to be slower than the box and rope method. “But

Brown’s analysis shows that they would in fact both mine the hole at the same slow rate.”

(Phillip Ball) The box and rope method is more risqué than the string method. It has way

more potential to malfunction. Brown argues that the best way to go about this is to use the

string method.

Another technique would be the Blandford-Znajek process. At some point in

nineteen-seventy-seven, Blandford and Znajek found a way, in principle, to separate vitality

from a dark utilizing the attractive field of a pivoting dark gap. The development around a

dark gap is believed to be polarized and is thought to increment as you draw nearer to the

occasion skyline. To assemble everything, the dark opening goes about as a conductor
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turning in an enormous attractive field created by the gradual addition plate. A gradual

addition circle is a quickly turning plate of gas that structures around stars.

Basically, this process is slowing the rotation of a black hole down. The equation for

this method is P ≅ (4π/μo) B2 RS2 c. “In this equation, P is the estimated power generated, B is

the magnetic field of the accretion disk, and RS is the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole.

This power is dissipated in the form of electromagnetic radiation and the flow of positions

towards the poles and electrons towards the equators along the magnetic field lines.” (Daniel

Nagasawa) The method is limited to the black holes life time. Once the black hole stops

rotating the energy no longer become useful.

There are a couple of problems with this method. First of all, there are no designs that

could possibly use the motions of electrons and convert them into usable power. There is also

the problem of reaching the black hole in the first place. There was a proposition for utilizing

a superconducting ring to utilize the attractive field lines to deliver control. Tragically, there

is no patent or logical paper to help this. It would just be hypothetical. It would likewise must

be a very explicit kind of dark gap.

Another method Daniel Nagasawa talks about is the Penrose process. Roger Penrose

proposed another way to extract energy. The Penrose process is all about conservation of

momentum. Conservation of momentum is the total linear momentum in a closed system is

constant and not affected by processes occurring inside the system. This way also has a

similar life span. It can only be used when a black hole is rotating. Thus, causing it to be very

limited to black holes.

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Fig. 2: “The Penrose Process works by extracting the energy from a black hole

through use of an intermediary particle. This particle entering the rotating black hole breaks

apart by some means sending one piece into the event horizon and the other out of the

ergosphere with more energy than it originated with.” (Daniel Nagasawa)

There are issues with this technique too. “Penrose himself said in his own paper that

the method is incredibly inefficient, although later calculations by Chandrasekhar in 1983

showed that the theoretical efficiency could reach 20% extra energy gained.” (Daniel

Nagasawa) There is also no means of transportation to the black hole. There is also no patent

design for converting this energy into usable energy.

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Now that we have gone through some theoretical possibilities, how could this affect

our life here on Earth? First of all, if we had enough energy, we could possibly stop using oil

partially. Pollution may go down depending on what we use this energy in. It may not replace

all oil products. But it could possibly help the Earth, rather than hurt it further. We would

also have to advance in science because collecting the energy may cause people to be

exposed to radiation for a longer period in time.

There are some issues that might occur while trying to power our world using black

holes. An issue that may cause it not to work at all is that miniature black holes may not

exist. No one has found any evidence or seen a miniature black hole to prove that they do, in

fact, exist. They were thought to be made in the very beginning of time. “As this primordial

soup got squished together and flung apart, causing fluctuations in density, the theory held,

occasionally some regions got so dense that the matter collapsed in on itself, forming mini

black holes, Hossenfelder said.” (Tia Ghose)

That is not our only problem though. Say we do get our hands on a miniature black

hole, how are we going to be able to go to one of these black holes? Tia Ghose writes in her

article, “That could take tens of thousands or even 100,000 years, Hossenfelder noted.”

Black holes do not have surfaces, so you cannot land on them. You also cannot move them.

So, how do we harness its energy? “By using the gravity of a much larger object, people

could theoretically tow a mini black hole, eventually coaxing it to sit in Earth's orbit, she

said.” (Tia Ghose) Using this method, we would have to shield ourselves from the radiation

that the black hole gives off while simultaneously “towing” the mini black hole.
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Another option, we could possibly do is, creating our own miniature black hole.

Stephen Hawking brings up in one of his lectures that we could do this in the extra

dimensions of space-time. Although, no one knows if these extra dimensions even exist.

Another issue with this is that the miniature black holes would exist for only seconds. They

would barely power anything, let alone the world. “If particle colliders such as the LHC did

produce these tiny black holes, the objects would stick around for just 10 raised to the minus

23 seconds, she said.” (Tia Ghose)

Tia Ghose accounts for all the possibilities within this article. She does not account

for the other theories by Roger Penrose, Blandford, Znajek, George Unruh, Robert Wald,

Albion Lawrence, Emil Martinec, and many others. Yes, it may not be possible to use

miniature black holes. Scientist can work around not using a miniature black hole. For

example, the Penrose process is all surrounded around a rotating black hole rather than a

miniature black hole. This is also with the Blandford-Znajek process. George Unruh and

Robert Wald with the box and rope method. Albion Lawrence and Emil Martinec with the

string method.

I also stated earlier in my essay that we could possibly make our own black hole.

Physics made a black hole to prove that Hawking radiation was real, a couple of years ago.

So, it would not be completely out of the ordinary to make one. We have the tools to make

them and now we know how. Although, that may pose the question, where would we even

put in? Stephen Hawking thought they we could possibly put it in Earth’s gravitational pull.

In this essay, I have covered multiple different ways black holes could be used as

power sources. I also briefly explained how they would affect life on Earth. I have covered
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the restrictions of these theoretical possibilities. I also went over the counter-argument, in

which, black holes could not be used as energy sources. In conclusion, I believe in next one-

hundred-thousand years we could power our world using black holes energy.
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Bibliography

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