Since these equipment cannot operate with perfect efficiency, they will need to eliminate waste heat.
Who says it has to operate at perfect efficiency? I would imagine that any slight improvement you get by incorporating a black hole into your cooling system (however the hell that would work) would be negated by the fact that a cooling system that involves a black hole is probably a bit expensive.
Obviously a spherical shell would be unstable, but you don't need a contiguous shell to lower the internal temperature. A rotating ring (or easier, an orbiting series of small, overlapping satellites) would be stable (not in the orbital sense, but in that they wouldn't need to hold themselves up) and could use the thermal gradient between their sides to power their station-keeping. You could construct additional rings at greater distances, each with a different inclination, to cover more of the angular area.
It's not too difficult to cool a system down to the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. All you need to do is build a radiator in interstellar space with a very large surface area, and connect it with the system you're trying to cool with some high thermal-conductance material.
However, even at the cosmic background temperature of T=3K, erasing a bit still costs a minimum of k
Tln 2 = 2.87e-23 J. What is needed is a way to efficiently cool a system down to near absolute zero. I think the only way to do it is with black holes.Still, it gets me thinking science-fictionally. Are there any stories where aliens invade the Earth just to use it as a heatsink? Travelling around from star to star, dumping all your waste heat into whatever planets you can find -- sounds like a great lifestyle.
Come to think of it, could black holes actually be used as an energy source? A setup like the one he describes would create a temperature gradient, and it's easy to extract power from that.
That would only make sense if this process somehow "depleted" the black hole; otherwise one could reverse entropy. IANA theoretical physicist so I don't know which mechanisms would be at work here.
Suppose that the entities living inside this civ are simulations. A second to us might be tens of thousands of years to them, because their hardware processing runs very slowly because of the low amounts of available energy.
I'm totally ignorant on the GR front; where's RobotRollCall?
That actually sounds like a pretty cool idea. Would it be possible to keep whales alive on land indefinitely?
Edit: I suppose you could always throw in the maintenance engineers when you're done with them. :)
On a site note I think lasers are the advanced cooling system of the future!
They're the advanced cooling system of the present! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_trap
For another thing, the electrical and magnetic fields generated by your computing and data transmitting hardware are going to induce a Lorentz force on the event horizon and torque it into rotation, which in turn produces both gravitational frame dragging and dissipation. Now it's a lot hotter than if it were just a Schwarzchild black hole emitting only Hawking radiation.
