- #1
Daniel Sellers
- 117
- 17
I'm a physics student and science fiction writer, and I've never been to this section of PF before! But I have an idea I think is cool for a novel or short story and I'd like some input on the physics involved. As I'm not overly worried about this idea being stolen I'm going to provide a short plot setup:
The setting is the distant future where human technology has progressed to near god like capabilities including, if we wanted to, the ability to go 'close' the event horizon and maintain a large enough radial acceleration to stay in one place (not close enough to become spaghettified).
In a physics lecture, a professor explains that in such a gravitational field you would experience time dilation. One problem you would have to contend with is that, depending on how close to the event horizon you were sitting, you might have thousands or even millions of years worth of stellar radiation bearing down on you at once.
A student naively suggests that we could place photovoltaics in such a position and then retrieve them with millions of years worth of energy stored in a battery (assuming the energy to avoid falling in was less than the energy you were collecting... blah blah hand waving)
"No," the professor explains, "because we, far from the black hole, would still have to wait millions of years before the battery was so charged. We might as well just build solar panels and wait a million years, but I have a lunch meeting this afternoon so I can't."
Another professor in the future-university overhears, and is inspired, because she is working on some project that requires an extreme amount of power (could go a lot of different directions with this). She thinks: I myself could go down near the event horizon, collect millions of years worth of solar power, and then come back up. Millions of years would have passed, but I could potentially have the largest concentration of energy in the universe in my possession. So she starts starts gathering a team to do just that.
If you've read all of this then thanks for your time! I'm mostly asking for input on the physics, what kind of technology this future-physicist would need etc... but there's a lot of room here for action and human interest so plot ideas are welcome too.
Thanks!
The setting is the distant future where human technology has progressed to near god like capabilities including, if we wanted to, the ability to go 'close' the event horizon and maintain a large enough radial acceleration to stay in one place (not close enough to become spaghettified).
In a physics lecture, a professor explains that in such a gravitational field you would experience time dilation. One problem you would have to contend with is that, depending on how close to the event horizon you were sitting, you might have thousands or even millions of years worth of stellar radiation bearing down on you at once.
A student naively suggests that we could place photovoltaics in such a position and then retrieve them with millions of years worth of energy stored in a battery (assuming the energy to avoid falling in was less than the energy you were collecting... blah blah hand waving)
"No," the professor explains, "because we, far from the black hole, would still have to wait millions of years before the battery was so charged. We might as well just build solar panels and wait a million years, but I have a lunch meeting this afternoon so I can't."
Another professor in the future-university overhears, and is inspired, because she is working on some project that requires an extreme amount of power (could go a lot of different directions with this). She thinks: I myself could go down near the event horizon, collect millions of years worth of solar power, and then come back up. Millions of years would have passed, but I could potentially have the largest concentration of energy in the universe in my possession. So she starts starts gathering a team to do just that.
If you've read all of this then thanks for your time! I'm mostly asking for input on the physics, what kind of technology this future-physicist would need etc... but there's a lot of room here for action and human interest so plot ideas are welcome too.
Thanks!