Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Unless you're assuming the power is not coming from the gun itself. I would 
> think anything powered by a black hole could probably generate as much power 
> as it needs to via hawking radiation.

  You can't use a black hole to generate energy because you have no way
of controlling the amount of energy it produces.

  Rather ironically, the smaller the black hole, the more energy it produces
(assuming the Hawking radiation hypothesis is true) and the faster it
evaporates, and very small black holes produce enormous amounts of energy
and evaporate extremely fast.

  For example, a black hole with a mass of 200 thousand kilograms would
evaporate in just 1 second and release an amount of energy equivalent
to 5 million megatons of TNT. (The largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated
was "only" 50 megatons.)

  I haven't done the math but I assume that if you had a manageable mass
as a black hole, such as 1 kilogram, it would evaporate in microseconds
or faster (and still release a rather big amount of energy).

  In order to keep the black hole at a constant mass and producing energy
you would need to feed it matter continuously. At the rate of evaporation
of a 1-kilogram black hole I wouldn't be surprised if you had to feed it
matter faster than c in order to keep it from evaporating.

  A much larger black hole takes more time to evaporate and releases less
energy. The problem now becomes how to handle that black hole and stop it
from plummeting towards the center of the Earth. A black hole (probably)
can have an electromagnetic charge, which means you could keep it hovering
inside a magnetic field. But we are talking about millions and millions of
tons here. The magnetic field required to keep a mass of that size hovering
is probably so strong that it would melt everything around it (including
the hardware used to create the magnetic field in the first place).

  Of course with such massive black hole you also get the problem of its
gravity becoming a significant hazard factor close to it. It would have to
be kept hovering quite far away from all other objects, and in a vacuum
(else it would constantly suck atmosphere).

  Then we have the problem of what to do with the excess energy. Not only
do you have to feed the black hole a constant stream of matter to stop it
from evaporating in a multi-million-megaton explosion, but you also have
to do something with the energy that it's producing. It has to go somewhere.
And there's a lot of it. (Basically you are converting matter into pure
energy, and matter has incredible amounts of it.)

  The hazards of having such a source of energy are quite great. You only
need a small disruption in the inflow of matter and you could end up with
a runaway evaporation that you cannot stop, and which would make the Tsar
Bomba look like a firecracker.

  Also if the black hole is not kept constantly charged it could escape
the magnetic field and fall to the ground, and again it would explode
(although this time probably somewhere inside the Earth).

  And this assuming you can produce such a black hole in the frist place...

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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