Black hole-powered starships might make interstellar travel possible

Whether by robotic sentai galleon, Wookie-piloted spaceship, or Somerton police box, it’s a safe bet that every person has at one point been fascinated by the prospect of flying at insane speeds into the far reaches of space.

 

A staple in science fiction stories, video games, and childhood fantasies alike, interstellar travel is one of the most persistent and popular ideas in the history of modern civilization, or perhaps even since a bored caveman first looked up at the night sky, saw a bright, sparkling dot in the cosmos, and grunted in awe.

 

However, years upon years of human curiosity have not been enough to solve the long-standing mystery of being able to travel from our end of the universe to parts unknown, and we are no closer to coming up with a solution than we were 36 years ago, when the fastest man-made object, the spacecraft Voyager I, was built.

 

Or are we?

 

Food for thought

 

A couple of years ago, Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland from Kansas State University wrote a paper that toyed with the idea of black hole-powered space travel.

 

The pair postulated that it would be possible to create a black hole for the purpose of serving as an energy source for a starship.

Of course, the proposed technology to achieve such a feat could only be aptly described as somewhere between “not possible yet” and “are you kidding me”:  a 370km2 solar panel orbiting 1,000,000 km from the sun’s surface. By Crane and Westmoreland’s estimates, such a set-up should be enough to gather enough energy for one black hole per revolution.

 

Additionally, the authors listed five criteria for a black hole to be suitable for use in space travel. The black hole should (a) last long enough, (b) be powerful enough to accelerate itself “up to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light in a reasonable amount of time,” (c) be small enough to access energy to create it, (d) be large enough to focus energy to create it, and (e) have sufficient mass to match a starship.

 

Pretty simple, huh?

 

Power overwhelming

 

Jeff Lee—a researcher for Icarus Interstellar’s X-Physics, Propulsion, and Power department—wrote an extensive piece discussing the possibility of a black hole-powered starship. Lee gave a talk on the same subject at last year’s Starship Congress, a four-day event discussing the possibility of humanity becoming an “interstellar civilization” by the year 2100.

 

 

'Ball lightning'

In his essay, Lee mentioned the concept of a ‘Schwarzschild Kugelblitz.’ The term ‘Kugelblitz,’ which literally means “ball lightning,” refers to what research pioneer John Wheeler imagined in 1955 as a ball of pure energy focused into a region of space. Wheeler, the physicist who gave black holes their name in the first place, proposed that such a configuration of concentrated energy would be sufficient to create a “microscopic black hole.” Think of it as something like Goku’s Kamehameha or Ryu from Street Fighter’s Shoryuken, except much more powerful.

 

Combined with the calculations of German physicist Karl Schwarzchild, one could theoretically come up with a Schwarzschild Kugelblitz (SK) – a non-rotating black hole of immense power. The resulting black hole would emit massive amounts of energy called ‘Hawking radiation,’ named after physicist Stephen Hawking.

 

According to Lee, such an SK would be tiny (perhaps smaller than an atom’s proton) but ridiculously heavy and powerful - about twice the weight of the Empire State Building, with an output ten million times the power that New York City consumed in July last year.

 

Of course, creating the energy source is only part of the problem – harnessing it is an entirely different matter.

 

To address that, Lee proposed that a Dyson Shell – described in 1960 by physicist Freeman Dyson as a spherical shell strong enough to contain a star, making it possible to harness its energy – could be constructed around the SK, with the resulting energy being fed directly to the starship’s heat engine.

 

Operation CWAL

 

Lee acknowledged that current technological challenges make it unlikely for an SK-powered starship to take flight in the near future. Still, as the researcher stressed: “[I]t’s imperative that we embrace a wide range of theoretical research.”

 

As long as there are scientists and thinkers who are willing to ask questions and look for answers, it’s entirely possible that we could one day reach the stars.

 

For now, however, we might have to stick to StarCraft. — TJD, GMA News