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All Our Energy Problems will be Solved!

You could have a planet orbiting the black hole. Whenever they want energy they just throw something that goes close to the black hole and then harvest that energy. The planet can then export, not the energy but what that energy produces.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
I suppose, to be serious for a minute, one way to get the terawatts of energy back to Earth to use it and in a timeframe not measured in centuries you could create a wormhole with one end at the black hole at the other near earth.

And then run a long extension cord through it.
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I doubt the idea would ever be to get the energy back to earth. The energy would be used for projects, and by people or other beings, far from the earth.

The only thing that I can see being sent back to the earth would be the product of information processing powered by the energy from the black hole.
 
rjh01 said:
You could have a planet orbiting the black hole. Whenever they want energy they just throw something that goes close to the black hole and then harvest that energy. The planet can then export, not the energy but what that energy produces.
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Pretty much any scenario involves FTL so all in the realm of speculation anyway.
 
There appears to be an underlying assumption here that Kardashev Type II civilizations that possess and use the technology to manipulate matter and energy on stellar scales will still choose how to apply this technology using heuristics evolved in the Cambrian era. (Expand! Multiply! Consume! More!)
 
theprestige said:
Also, what about more modern heuristics, like Explore! Discover! Experience! Enjoy!
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Those things don't require quantities of power sufficient to create the things being explored, discovered, experienced, and/or enjoyed out of pure energy.

I'm seriously wondering about diminishing returns here. Having enough energy to heat or cool my living space to around 23 degrees C is very nice. Being able to cool it to 1 Kelvin or heat it to a million degrees wouldn't improve it any farther. In a Dyson Swarm civilization either I'd control enough matter, energy, and processing to have my own personal continent-sized Disneyland; or I'd be one of an absurdly huge population. Would either of those things benefit me very much compared to my current life? If maximizing the population is the imperative, then we'd just be scaling up scarcity; if not, then what's the swarm for?

Zooming around the galaxy visiting habitable alien planets sounds like fun if we could use Star Wars hyperdrives, but the laws of physics don't appear to give us those. Instead the type II civ, if they avoid scarcity, could have elaborate personal/family living spaces, with travel from place to place within a swarm (a large stationary swarm or a smaller in-transit swarm), from one artificial environment to another. It's the suburbs, scaled up, in spaaaaaaace!
 
Myriad said:
If maximizing the population is the imperative, then we'd just be scaling up scarcity; if not, then what's the swarm for?
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Why make population "imperative"? The scale of resources in the solar system is such that you could both scale up the population and personal material resources by a factor of a million each.
 
Myriad said:
Those things don't require quantities of power sufficient to create the things being explored, discovered, experienced, and/or enjoyed out of pure energy.
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I want to explore, discover, etc. the Andromeda galaxy. And after that, the rest of the Virgo Supercluster. And after that, the Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex. And after that, the Perseus–Pegasus Filament. And after that, the Laniakea Supercluster. And after that, the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall and the Giant GRB Ring. And after that, the regions of the universe that are causally disconnected from us due to spacetime expansion.

Those things don't require quantities of power sufficient to create the things being explored, discovered, experienced, and/or enjoyed out of pure energy.

I'm seriously wondering about diminishing returns here. Having enough energy to heat or cool my living space to around 23 degrees C is very nice. Being able to cool it to 1 Kelvin or heat it to a million degrees wouldn't improve it any farther. In a Dyson Swarm civilization either I'd control enough matter, energy, and processing to have my own personal continent-sized Disneyland; or I'd be one of an absurdly huge population. Would either of those things benefit me very much compared to my current life? If maximizing the population is the imperative, then we'd just be scaling up scarcity; if not, then what's the swarm for?

Zooming around the galaxy visiting habitable alien planets sounds like fun if we could use Star Wars hyperdrives, but the laws of physics don't appear to give us those. Instead the type II civ, if they avoid scarcity, could have elaborate personal/family living spaces, with travel from place to place within a swarm (a large stationary swarm or a smaller in-transit swarm), from one artificial environment to another. It's the suburbs, scaled up, in spaaaaaaace!
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You're thinking like a pre-KI civ.
 
Myriad said:
Zooming around the galaxy visiting habitable alien planets sounds like fun if we could use Star Wars hyperdrives, but the laws of physics don't appear to give us those.
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The laws of physics give us time dilation and traveling to take advantage of time dilation requires a vast amount of energy.
 
theprestige said:
You're thinking like a pre-KI civ.
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Well, of course I am, and so are you. How could it be otherwise? The whole concept of K-whatever civilizations inevitably "progressing" to K-whatever+I civilizations by expanding even farther and exploiting vastly greater energy sources on vastly greater scales than the previous stage is based on a narrative of perpetual progress that's one of the core features of our present day civilization.

As arguably it should be, because so far we've failed to provide everyone with even basic needs, opting to increase the population instead while preserving scarcity. (Oh, but of course, a civ with a K in it certainly wouldn't do that; somewhere along the line, human nature will change or the AIs will take over or the aliens will teach us or the Crystal Convergence will finally kick in or whatever, and our descendants will do so much better.)

But I'm not even talking about that. Let's assume a stable post-scarcity state is reached at some future point. I still see an issue with diminishing returns. Take megalomania out of the picture (which seems to me to be pretty much a requirement for reaching that post-scarcity state) and how much can any one person actually derive benefit from? Double the size of the room I'm in now, and double the linear size of my windows and electronic screens to compensate for the increased distance, and what have I gained? Okay, if there wasn't a pandemic, that would allow me to throw a bigger party. Good enough. But how many doublings does that work for? If my living room were the size of a convention center, I could throw a meatspace party for 50,000 people, but if everyone's were that size, on the average the most frequently I could possibly need the full capacity of mine would be for one party in every 50,000. Barring vastly extended life spans, it's never going to be used.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
The laws of physics give us time dilation and traveling to take advantage of time dilation requires a vast amount of energy.
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Relativistic travel can never give you a Star Trek or Star Wars cosmos. It does open up possibilities, but all your interstellar space voyages are also time voyages, and the time voyages are always one-way.

You do need a vast amount of energy, and you also need a way to concentrate that vast amount of energy into the velocity of a small amount of structurally integrated matter (yourself and your vehicle). Imagine the Enterprise's engine room. Now imagine the power converted by every nuclear reactor and turbine and internal combustion engine on present-day Earth simultaneously, all flowing through whatever engine is in that room. What materials do you think it could be made of, that would hold up for even a second, let alone the thousand years if would take in the most ideal case to accelerate the Enterprise to a tenth of light speed? (What Captain Kirk would call "one tenth impulse power" or something like that.) Oh, you were hoping it would be faster than that, like in SF? Then multiply that power by a few hundred thousand times more. Self-contained propulsion up to high-gamma relativistic speeds is going to be a bit problematic.

With star-output and black-hole power levels, you can use lasers and light sails instead, which should be enough for interstellar hops. For high-gamma relativistic travel across the galaxy or between galaxies, there are potential issues with redshift, and you'd better hope whoever's maintaining the lasers keeps it up for the requisite centuries or millennia, or you risk being stranded at too low a gamma. Also, slowing down at a destination (if that's what you want to do) is a bit of a problem, that I'll leave to the Kardashians to solve.
 
Myriad said:
Now imagine the power converted by every nuclear reactor and turbine and internal combustion engine on present-day Earth simultaneously, all flowing through whatever engine is in that room. What materials do you think it could be made of, that would hold up for even a second, let alone the thousand years if would take in the most ideal case to accelerate the Enterprise to a tenth of light speed?
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Not clear why you think it would take thousands of years to get to 1/10 light speed. Getting to 1/10 tenth light speed in a year is well within the capabilities of current known materials and mechanisms if we had some fantastic reason to need/want go to that trouble and fantastic expense.

And there are mechanisms that don't require channeling all the energy through some small engine room. Solar sails comes to mind. Ion accelerators in the vacuum of space can be long/large but don't have to be massive.
 
I'd be more interested in channeling all that energy into antimatter production and storage, and channeling the antimatter into engine rooms.

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I suppose at some point the thing would be to use Dyson Shakdov drives to feed stars to black holes and harvest the energy output.

If there are KIII+ civs out there, we might expect to see whole galaxies going dim.
 
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theprestige said:
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I suppose at some point the thing would be to use Dyson Shakdov drives to feed stars to black holes and harvest the energy output.

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It just seems counter productive to move stars around rather than harness the energy of the stars themselves. It's not like you would run out of stars.

Don't tell me: Even if you are a billionaire, another dollar here and there doesn't hurt..
 
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