An old (1962 or before) piece of concept art from Kaman illustrating their “ROMAR,” a helicopter meant for Mars exploration. It appears to be powered by rotortip rockets, a decent enough approach for this sort of thing. However, this was before Mariner mars ’64, when the understood density of the Martian atmosphere dropped by more than a factor of ten. As a result, a helicopter like this would need to be made fabulously low-weight in order to fly, something improbable given the needs of a manned vehicle.
The story is objectively *not* funny. But the way it’s told *is.* Bonus: as you listen along, try to guess how old the guy talking is. Chances are *real* good you’ll be surprised.
In pondering my post about the Great Silence, and hypothetical advanced civilizations planning on outliving the stars to take up residence around supermassive black holes, I looked to see if there was an online Hawking radiation calculator and, yup, there is:
Easy to use; enter a value for any quantity, the other values are automatically generated. Some examples:
If you start off with a 1 billion solar mass black hole, the expected lifetime will be 2.1X10^94 years. Long time. But the power emitted while that massive is a paltry 9X10^-47 watts, which might be a bit tricky to live on, even at a really slow rate.
If your want one watt of power output, you need a black hole substantially smaller than Earth, 1.9X10^13 metric tons. The lifespan of such a black hole is a mere 1.8×10^25 years. However, this could be extended indefinitely. The lifespan calculation assumes that the black hole is left alone to progress naturally… nothing is added in. So as the black hole evaporates, it loses mass, gets smaller, gets hotter, spits out more power and, in the last second, goes out with a bang. But if you dump mass into the black hole at the same rate that energy comes out, the black hole will be extended indefinitely.
Now assume that your civilization wants to make it to 10^100 years at one watt. Seems a little low-power to me, but go with it. One watt ain’t a lot of power, but 10^100 years is a *looooong* time. One watt would require the conversion of 1.1126500560536E-17 kilograms per second, or about 3.9X10^90 kilograms total. That’s… a lot. That’s about 1.76X10^60 times the mass of the sun. If galaxies mass 100 billion suns, you’ll need about 1.76X10^49 entire galaxies to produce one watt for that long.
One could argue that that’s unrealistic.
However, if one could somehow gather that much mass together into one black hole (and I feel confident in stating “you can’t,” not least because the mass of the visible universe seems to be on the order of 25 billion galaxies), the expected lifetime of it would be 10^248 years. The diameter would be an impressive 10^48 *lightyears* and the power would be a trifling 2.9×10^-149 watts. This is of course much less than one watt. So how to get one watt out of it? Simple, slice a small 1.9X10^13 metric ton chunk out of the big black hole. How? Don’t ask me, but if you’ve got the ability to gather together a black hole that masses more than the universe, I’m sure you can figure it out. Now, you have a *tiny* black hole that radiates one watt, and one *gigantic* black hole that radiates approximately nothing. You’ll need to top off your small black hole every now and again to keep it’s mass relatively constant. How? Well, dip into the bigger hole. The big hole serves as long-term cold storage of mass, to be “burned” in the furnace of your small black hole.
Let’s say you’re a bit more constrained. You still need one watt, but you’re stuck with the mass of the galaxy, approximately 100 billion suns. If you can squish it all down into one cold-storage black hole of 100 billion suns and one small “furnace” black hole, one watt will burn through your supply of mass in only 5.67X10^50 years. That’s only 10^40 times the current age of the universe. If your processor is running at one-trillionth the speed of reality, that means you’ll only perceive a lifespan of 5.67X10^38 years. Hopefully you can get done whatever it is you were hoping to do in that time.
Other Fun Facts: so, your black hole has just about evaporated away. You enter “one second” into the “lifetime” box. With one second left to live, the black hole is only 3.4×10-20 centimeters in radius, but it’s putting out a toasty 6.8×10^21 watts, and has a mass of 228270.5 kilograms. Every last one of those kilograms will be converted to energy in that last second. if you’ve made the mistake of transporting your itty-bitty black hole to Earth, you’re going to make a heck of a dent with the resulting 4.9 million megaton blast.
Another example: let’s say you have a heavy particle collider, working with such power and speeds that you think it’s just possible that you will smack protons together hard enough to squish ’em into tiny little black holes. “Oh, no!” screech the protestors. “You’ll kill us all with your constant playing of god!”
Well… no. Let’s be astoundingly generous and say you can create a black hole massing one microgram, many orders of magnitude greater than the mass of a proton. The microgram-black hole will be at a temperature of 10^32 degrees. This is important, since the radiant energy at those power levels will produce *substantial” photon pressure at atomic scale dimensions. In essence, the black hole will have its own deflector shield, preventing other particles from being sucked in. What’s even better: the lifetime of the microgram black hole is only 8.4X10-44 seconds… and Planck time – the smallest unit of time that seems to exist, is about 10^43 seconds. This means that the black hole will cease to be a black hole in less time than it takes to do literally *anything.*
Give it a read. It is… remarkable. It reads like the sort of thing someone would write if they were trying to spoof creationists. The icing on the crazycake is the anger the writer expresses at the “hoax” of Darwininan evolution.
You want to go be an aid worker in a war zone? Knock yourself out. Want to drag your 16, 14 and 11-year-old children along? No. Screw you, buddy, that’s child endangerment.
The Great Silence is one of the more fantastic names that has been slapped onto a concept in recent decades. For those who might not know, The Great Silence – a.k.a. the Fermi Paradox – refers to the ongoing and somewhat baffling lack of any evidence *at* *all* of technological civilizations elsewhere in the universe. Even pessimistic estimates of such things suggest there should be thousands of high tech cultures in the galaxy, with tens of thousands more having existed in the past; if so, where are they? Why can’t we hear them chattering away? Are they hiding from us? Are they communicating via means we can’t detect? Or are we just alone?
A new hypothesis has been put forward to explain this. And, spectacularly, the authors reference the Cthulhu Mythos in doing so.
The paper proceeds from the assumption that civilizations arise in sizable numbers and rapidly technologically progress. They survive all the dangers and proceed right on to Singularity-level tech and power. But here’s the thing: if you have advanced so far that it makes more sense to download all your peoples minds into computers and run the simulations, rather than living in meatspace, the current universe may not be the best one for you. What you might want rather than this universe of bright stars and a warm background temperature of several degrees kelvin is a cold, dark universe where computational systems will run *extremely* efficiently. Even if the systems are low power, so that the simulation may run thousands or even billions of times slower than real life, if you are running the system in the far future after most of the stars have burned out, you could be dealing with time scales *trillions* of times longer than you might currently envision. So the math works out that for any set amount of natural resources – in this case, energy – you might want to go to sleep for a *really* long time and wait for the stars to die out, *then* wake up and begin the true living phase of your culture. You might live a billion times slower than modern day humans, but you might be dealing with a potential lifespan of your computational system that is ten to the power of a very large number of years.
This sort of thing was discussed – sadly, without reference to Cthulhu – in this video from about a year ago. Here, the idea of a truly advanced civilization is proposed, setting up shop around a large black hole, harvesting it for energy. If you know how to do it, black holes could be the ultimate energy source: you drop a rock into one, and, over time, the black hole loses the mass of the rock through Hawking radiation. It’s the one method known for conversion of mass into energy at essentially 100% efficiency. Sure, antimatter/matter reactions will do that, but the manufacture of the antimatter in the first places is *stupid* inefficient. On the other hand, if you are content to wait a really, really long time, harvesting a black hole might just keep your civilization ticking along for, say, ten to the power of fifty or a hundred years.
So, put it all together. An advanced civilization realizes they need a cold, dark universe before they can really live efficiently. They might find themselves a super-massive black hole at the center of a galaxy, and be content to wait a few dozen billion years for things to cool down, then they wake up and start doing their thing. A civilization like this would be far beyond us, but so long as we didn’t go poking them with a stick, we should be ok. But consider the same sort of civilization, but one *determined* to live just as long as possible. 10^100 years isn’t enough, they want 10^120 years. How could they make that happen? Well, for starters, they’d need to shut off not only new star formation, but stellar fusion. The Sun, for example, will burn itself out in five billion years or so and then go kerflooey, leaving behind a white dwarf that’s only a fraction of the suns current mass.All the mass that gets converted into photons and neutrinos is lost, as far as the aliens are concerned. but of course, right now they’re sleeping away the strange aeons.
But their servitors might be prowling around. What would *their* task be? Well, if the aliens are not only waiting for cold and dark, but also depend on the mass-energy of the supermassive black hole at the galactic center, then the servitors should be wandering around carving up stars. Using starlifting techniques, they can draw off a large fraction of the hydrogen from a star. This hydrogen can be turned into a vast number of, say, brown dwarfs; fusion has shut off, the hydrogen is now in long term cold storage in convenient bite-sized chunks. The brown dwarfs are put into orbit around the central black hole, and one is dropped in every however many billion years to keep the black holes mass relatively constant. Alternatively, stars could be converted into neutron stars or black holes through means I couldn’t begin to guess, for eventual dropping into the main black hole.
This would end up with sleeping beings of godlike power, waiting for the stars to be right (in this case, dead and “off”). They have semi-sentient servants skulking around out in the darkness carrying out missions that are totally indifferent to the suffering and desires of pissant fleaspeck beings like us. Missions we probably wouldn’t understand either the “why” or the “how” of if we saw them, and would be wholly incapable of doing anything about.
