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0 pointselectromagnetic16y ago0 comments

Would placing the spaceships crew behind its black hole engine provide adequate shielding from cosmic radiation and blue-shifted photons/particles? Killing two birds with one black hole, so to speak.

Also, wouldn't being in such proximity to a black hole negate the need for time dilation effects of speed anyway? If you can build black holes, speed is meaningless as you essentially have a stasis machine. You could travel at .1c, reach Alpha Centauri in 40+ years and never even age a day if you can get close enough to the event horizon.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

pyre16y ago· 2 in thread

How do you place the crew 'behind' the black hole? Space is 360 degrees.

electromagneticOP16y ago

Actually space is ~130,000 degrees (slightly less, disappointing I know) because it's 3 dimensional, not 2D.

However I was talking about a vehicles design here, and suggesting an engine-in-front design rather than an engine-behind. Like the humble car, an engine-in-front design may protect the driver from nasty impacts, in this case blue-shifted gamma rays and microscopic particles that have been blue-shifted to the point that your ship is in a giant particle collider. If you could hide the crew in a sort of eclipsed position behind (in relation to the direction of momentum) the event horizon would act as a shield. This would mean you only had to harden equipment against radiation, rather than find a way to protect the crew themselves.

IMO though, if you've built a black hole, you might as well be moving something big, as in either a planet, small moon, or giant colony. On these scales the need to travel fast would become redundant, your colony ship could be so big it could literally house a world. Then an organisation like NASA would essentially become a planetary bus-driver association.

pyre16y ago

> Actually space is ~130,000 degrees (slightly less, disappointing I know) because it's 3 dimensional, not 2D.

That's what I was thinking, but it came out in a 2D manner. How embarrassing. ^^;; > an engine-in-front design may protect the driver from nasty impacts, in this case blue-shifted gamma rays and microscopic particles that have been blue-shifted to the point that your ship is in a giant particle collider.

Ah, I thought that we were talking about other radiation (solar,background,gamma,etc) in space. In that case, you can't really hide 'behind' something because there isn't necessarily a single source to hide from. Even if only nearby solar radiation was a problem, if you ended up in a binary star system, you would have two sources to 'hide' from.

> IMO though, if you've built a black hole, you might as well be moving something big, as in either a planet, small moon, or giant colony.

I thought that the LHC was supposed to create miniature black holes. Though they're supposed to immediately dissipate, I don't think we've necessarily crossed the boundary of 'able to move whole planets' just because we're able to create a black hole.

mnemonicsloth16y ago

Getting an asteroid-sized mass to lase gamma rays all at once is probably much harder than preserving the quantum state of a 100kg person.

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