I read something about how one could build a powerplant near a black hole. It would work like the hydrogenplants on earth, but instead of falling water it would be other matter falling towards the hole, providing the energy. They didn't say much and it was a while ago I read it, but it seems like an innovative solution...

The walls of a dam essentially have a great amount of friction, preventing the water from washing away the walls. And then, water is allowed to leak through, turning turbines.

The problem with making turbines and allowing mass to fall into a black hole, is that 'what's holding the turbines'? They'd fall in too!

I guess you could make a really, (REALLY) long tether, holding the turbines to a orbiting gas giant, or something.

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What if you had it in orbit around the black hole? Of course, any matter turning the "turbines" would alter the orbit anyway, right? I wonder if this could be done in some way...

Things can orbit black holes, you just need to be a certain distance away. If you had a metallic surface orbitting a black hole you could place all your turbines ect. on it. You could also have cities.

The matter could be rubbish from the cities, gas, asteroids, anything really! The matter would be sent in toward the black hole, and be spun back out (using a carefully plotted trajectory) hitting your turbines and creating electricity. This could also be used to launch space ships at extreemely high speeds.

There is one problem with a black hole power plant, it would take a long time before the mass came back. For the most energy in your matter you would try and get the matter close to the black hole (which would increase its speed more) as you could, but there is a problem in this, the closer it gets to the hole, the slower it seems to go! The matter may be travelling at huge speeds (maybe speeds of >.5c), but to an outside observer it would seem to be travelling at extremely slow speeds. This effect was predicted by Einstien, in his General Theory of Reletivity.

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The slingshot idea seems cool, you would have the black hole to accelerate the mass before having it generate electricity.


Or what about this idea. You could build the turbine as a ring around the black hole, with lots of huge shovels placed around an extremely strong cable (this cable going around the hole as a circle). These "shovels" would be perhaps giant magnetic fields. Then you could let the accretion disk (of massive amounts of matter being sucked in to the hole) around the black hole make this giant ring spin around. Of course to build something like this would not be easy :-)

The biggest problem with the ideas here is the ergosphere would not allow a stable orbit of the black hole. :huh:
It is in the ergoshere where the turbines would have to be to generate the power.
And with no means we know of to keep the turbines from being sucked through the event horizon.

And I don't think I'd want any settlements near a black hole. I don't care what you can get from it. The best way to deal with a black hole is by the A T and T method.
LONG DISTANCE, and the farther at that, the better.

But now using an ergosphere to launch ships at great speeds is pure genus, and nothing could beat a black hole for a garbage dump. :P

Well it would be orbiting the black hole of course...

Over time the black hole would shrink and wouldn't that cause effect on what is orbiting it? Couldn't the gravity attraction change when it shrinks and whatever orbiting the black hole would be sent out or sucked in?

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Over time the size of a black hole changes, if it absorbs more mass it gets bigger, but it takes a long time for a black hole to decrese in mass, with Hawking Radiation.

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Yes I understand that, I have read like three of his books. I was just wondering if the mass change of the black hole would have an effect on whats orbiting it.

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Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein

"The book of nature is written in mathematical language." -- Galileo

The change would be more mass would increase the size and gravity influence of the black hole, so orbital elements would eventually be consumed it the orbit isn't adjusted quite frequently.

If the black holes mass increased its gravity would increse, so for objects to continue to orbit it at the same speed it would need to go further out. And if the black holes mass decreased its gravitational influence would decrease so for objecvts to continue to orbit at the same speed they would need to go closer to the black hole.

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I began looking over a similiar question myself and soon realized that even the method of preparing the question was non-trivial.

http://www.relativitydomains.com/General/P.../PlanOrbit1.htm

It would be nice though to be able to throw people you hate into a black hole with some measure of chance. Russian roulette on a cosmological stage. The physics behind the energy inherent in that state of motion is known, but how will you design those machines, and what will you make them out of? Shouldn't we be looking for mega-engineering projects we can begin modelling for accuracy? I want a program like celestia that models physics {QED, Relativistic mechanics}, that is easily upgradeable with new theories. Autocad is cool for modelling some stuff, but something like celestia can be used by anyone productively. Does anyone know of an open source physics program or philosophy?

Found this
http://physics.clarku.edu/~hgould/teaching...g/Dcomp2002.pdf

http://www.particle.kth.se/~fmi/kurs/Physi.../resources.html

I think english will eventually become a second language as I use my mind for the contructing of machines, I wonder if painters live a life in art as I hope to live a life in engineering. Maybe those dirty hippies aren't so bad after all.

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