RE: Hole in a box

From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Mon Feb 18 2002 - 15:45:33 MST


Amara wrote, amongst other things...
> To power the energy output of a quasar (10^{47} erg/sec), assuming
> an efficiency mass conversion via a swirling accretion disk of 10%,
> would require swallowing more than 10 M_solar per year.
>

Well, by now I'm pretty well lost !

What I was originally asking, btw, was whether the concept of a dyson sphere
(or cloud, or m-brain variant, or some other derivative of the
shell-enclosing-power-source concept), would make sense using a black hole
(into which you throw a lot of stuff), rather than the traditional star.
>From the above, I _think_ that I can assume that it could make sense,
assuming one has such astronomical (!) amounts of matter to play with, and
would prefer a lot of energy to a lot of matter.

Here, I'm thinking of an SI which is burning its candle at both ends, so to
speak. Why not?

Emlyn
(also, I'm not criticising the direction the thread has taken... awesome
effort, everyone! I'll take some time out to read it all properly and try to
absorb it, then drop down into Amara's links)

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