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WHAT IF
  • 2/14/2024
What would happen if you put a couple of physicists in a room with a rope, a box and a black hole?

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00:00 (music)
00:06 What would happen if you put a couple of physicists
00:08 in a room with a rope, a box, and a black hole?
00:13 They might come up with a plan
00:15 to power the Earth for centuries.
00:18 This is WHAT IF,
00:19 and here's what would happen
00:21 if we could harness the energy of a black hole.
00:25 Black holes aren't something you come across every day.
00:28 To make a black hole of your own,
00:30 you'd have to squeeze a star
00:32 ten times bigger than our Sun
00:34 into a sphere the diameter of New York City.
00:37 Black holes are very dense and have enormous mass.
00:41 And as we know from a famous Albert Einstein equation,
00:45 everything that has mass also has energy.
00:48 In the case of a black hole,
00:50 we're talking a whole lot of energy.
00:53 Theoretically, we could collect all that power
00:55 without any super-advanced new tech.
00:58 And if we did, we'd have access to more energy
01:01 than we'd know what to do with.
01:04 But of course, it's not that easy.
01:07 What makes black holes such an attractive energy source?
01:11 It's their high energy conversion rate.
01:14 Let's do some math.
01:15 Take a 3 kg kitten
01:17 and multiply his mass by the speed of light squared.
01:21 You'll see that the energy contained within this one little kitty
01:24 is enough to power up 6.4 million American homes for a year.
01:30 But you could never extract all that energy from a cat.
01:33 The best energy producers we have right now,
01:35 nuclear fission and nuclear fusion,
01:38 only gather 0.08% and 0.7% of the potential energy in mass.
01:44 Black holes are a different story.
01:47 Their energy conversion rate sits around the 40% mark.
01:52 But finding a black hole wouldn't be easy.
01:55 With today's available technology,
01:57 even getting into the neighborhood of a black hole
01:59 would take you about 12 million years.
02:02 So let's fast forward and assume that we've found a black hole nearby.
02:06 How would we go about getting the most out of it?
02:10 We could try throwing stuff into the black hole.
02:13 The gravitational pull of a black hole
02:15 would cause anything dropped into it
02:17 to speed up and release energy as it went.
02:21 Or we could drop things into the accretion disk of a black hole,
02:24 where all the dust particles are caught in its orbit.
02:27 From there, we'd be collecting energy in the form of radiation,
02:31 something known as the Penrose Process.
02:34 But how exactly would we collect all this energy?
02:38 Some great minds have come up with a theory that
02:40 a box designed to collect energy
02:43 could be sent from a safe distance point via a rope
02:46 to a location close to a black hole's event horizon,
02:49 filling with radiation in the process.
02:52 One problem here is ensuring that the box and the rope
02:55 don't get sucked into the hole.
02:57 According to some calculations,
02:58 the box suitable for this task
03:00 could only be the size of bacteria,
03:03 so that the rope could still support it.
03:05 We might as well dip strings right into the event horizon
03:08 and drain a black hole completely dry.
03:11 It would take a very, very long time, but once it's done,
03:14 the most ambitious energy dreams would come true.
03:18 We could abandon our power plants
03:19 and finally stop polluting the planet.
03:22 We could fuel up our rockets and go explore outer space.
03:26 We'd start building megastructures in space.
03:29 The things we could do with unlimited energy.
03:32 But first, we'd need to spend millions of years
03:34 traveling to a suitable black hole.
03:36 That is, unless we could develop a warp drive technology
03:39 to speed things up.
03:41 But that's a story for another WHAT IF.
03:46 ♪ MUSIC ♪

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