Did you just create a black hole sized gamma pulsar? Bad! Bad Icekatze! LOL I'm guessing you've allready read Greg Egan's "Diaspora" there's a similar plot in that story. I don't realy have any commnets on the science but I do wonder where the schwarzschild radius lies in relation to the event horizon of the hole. I'm guessing they're pretty close to the same thing but I'm not willing to do the math. But you're talking about building your ring somewhere outside of the event horizon right? In that situation I think you just stopped or slowed stuff falling into the hole so, the event horizon gets stretched from a sphere to a disk or at least becomes a little bit eliptic. I don't think anything else happens.

Wouldn't matter. The singularity has already formed. There is no "surface" to distort, it's a point mass created by collapsing (for want of a better word) mass which has passed it's Schwarzchild limit (SL). You can't change the SL without changing the mass, as the limit is a function of the gravity of the mass acting upon itself. For you to distort the mass in any way you'd need to be creating a gravitational force that would counteract and exceed that of the singularity itself, which means the ring would be exerting sufficent gravitational force by that point to actually become another singularity (you wanna suck like me, you gotta be like me). I would suggest that it would be impossible to construct such a ring without it collapsing into itself, and the central singularity and creating a higher mass singularity with a larger event horizon. If you had some sort of superscience magic gravity generator that lets you generate gravitational attraction without mass, some sort of laws of physics busting spacetime distortion device, you might be able to influence the event horizon, but you still can't do anything to the singularity itself, everything inside the event horizon is heading for that singularity, and once in there is out of play. Trying to yank stuff out of the black hole just isn't possible according to our understanding of how they work - once you are in, you are in (although this in itself is a violation of several understood laws, see the information paradox and reversism). My wild arsed guess wiould be that the singularity would start to evaporate faster, producing more Hawking radiation, but this is just a guess. But, that all seems like an awful lot of effort for beings that may/may not have built whateverthehell the pandora gates are. I'd just have them build a flare device around a nice fat O or B type star and send a wave of giant EM pulses out, or open a gate to a black hole in the stars core and send it supernova. The classic SFRP Traveller had a race called the Darrians who blasted their high tech empire back to the stone age using a couple of stellar probes, some coupled Meson beams and a tungsten plume. See here: http://traveller.wikia.com/wiki/Maghiz G.

The space and time warping effects surrounding the black hole would indeed be altered by the gravitational pull of nearby objects, regardless of size. This idea is to approach it with an object so large that it has macro effects. There's no reason why you have to make your approaching object a sphere. If anything, that would seem to make the entire project a good deal less tenable. If you have a second massive object, say another black hole, and could control its position, you can have a similar effect, more directed, with less difficulty (relatively speaking). You could drive your black hole nearby and through adjusting your position and rotational speed, you would be sucking matter and energy from one black hole to the next, and in the process, spitting out lots of energy. This energy would be somewhat directed. Depending on your control, you could keep this process going for a while, until one black hole or the other ran out of mass. What would come out? Lots of gamma radiation. I've read some ideas, well above my pay grade, that things collected into a black hole do not necessarily lose their pattern. They don't become undifferentiated black hole matter. If this is the case, you might also get EM radiation matching, somehow, the stuff that has been sucked into the black hole over the past million years, warped twice by intense gravity effects.

GJD wrote:

Nuh-huh. Stick two black holes near each other and they attract each other. One consumes the other, without sucking anything out, creating a bigger black hole. You cannot suck matter out of the singularity - it's not a place anymore, it's a point of zero dimension and infinite density (although whenever the word infinite is used you are allowed to shout "Foul"). Black holes lunching on each other probably will create a bunch of energetic radiation, spraying about all over the shop - or not. Most of the radiation from black holes is though to be a byproduct created by infalling matter getting accelerated and spat back out as energised particles, mostly Xrays and localised gamma. A pair of rotating black holes in the proces of merging might be nicely regular or like a giant cosmic x-ray firehose on the loose.

Well, to be fair, we don't really know that. We know that a black hole's dimensions are smaller than its Schwarzschild radius, but we have yet to definitely prove that it compresses to a singularity point. For all we know, there is a point at which matter cannot be compressed anymore, and black holes bring it right to that. Most of what we know about black holes is pure speculation. Especially questionable is Hawking radiation, which much like the tachyons is purely hypothetical with zero evidence to support it outside of mathematical framework.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

The idea that matter dosen't lose its information when it falls beyond the event horizon relates to it's quantum state and entropy. the laws of thermodynamics state that the entropy of a closed system can never change, increase or decrease. Basically, what the universe starts with, it ends with. Black holes seem to violate this as matter falling into them looses it's entropy as it's blackholatised - thus breaking the laws of thermodynamics. The thought is that in fact the quantum state of the material falling into the black hole has to be retained to avoid breaking these laws. Ther's lots of math involved which is complicated and might as well be written in the ancient language of the mud men of the planet Zorb to me, but my understanding is that the "information" is not the kind of information we mean when we are talking about lenght, width, chemical composition, colour or any of that stuff, but a specific term used in quantum mechanics. G.

But again, this is an area where we have little to know information. It's very possible that black holes fit squarely within the laws of physics, and that we're simply looking at them the wrong way. The fact is that we can only get so much data staring at them from this far away. Personally, I have a feeling that black holes are like the universe's reset button. It's very possible that the big bang event might have been the process of a black hole's end-life, and black hole's themselves are parts of the universe recompressing in preparation for the start of another universal cycle. Unfortunately, our physical understanding of such distant objects tends to fall under scientific philosophy more than it does scientific fact. Hopefully we'll have a better understanding in our lifetimes (and hopefully we'll achieve immortality as well).

GJD wrote:

Yes, true- theory all, since we don't have a handy black hole and look-inside-a-black-hole machine to hand. My understanding, though, is that there are three things involved here: The SL, the event horizon and the eventual singularity - three different things. Matter passing the SL cannot escape the gravity of the singularity, anything passing the event horizon cannot be observed and everything inside the SL will eventually become part of the singularity. The SL and the event horizon aren't physical barriers (despite whatever Voyager would try to have you belive - using a phased piffle beam to widen a crack in the event horizon?), they are just mathematical limits where certain effects come into play - so matter passing through them dosen't change in and of itself, it just means it's now unobservable or on a one way trip to Singularitysville. You might be able to alter the SL by introducing a local mass, and maybe even manipulate it through clever magitech, but that won't result in gamma bursts or any other kind of burst, just like moving the lines on a football pitch wouldn't cause the players to emit gamma radiation either. All you do is give the infalling matter a chnce to escape, which the change in local spacetime curvature may allow it to do. Altering the event horizon is different, and I'm really not ure that this could be done - not sure as in the physics are too complicated for me to postulate, not not sure as in I don't think it can be done. If i had to guess, I'd say that our current understanding says that the event horizon could be altered, but that the effects of doing so would ultimatly mean little, since the observability near to the event horizon breaks down anyway - it'd be kind of like enlarging a blurry image - you can see more of it, but it's still a mess. G.

I think that the more likely scenario is that the matter within the black hole does have dimension, and factors can increase the radius of the blackhole itself; This could cause its mass to widen and exceed the Schwarzschild radius, thus granting the matter on the outermost edge a chance to escape, shrinking the Schwarzschild radius and repeating the process. My hypothesis is that heat is the factor that potentially expands the matter within a black hole. This might also explain why the matter in the universe was both hot and dense at the time of first expansion: the only means by which matter can escape a black hole is by achieving a certain apex point of heat.

valen wrote:

I think the biggest problem with this scenario is that the nearest blackhole is 1600 lightyears away from earth. Is that even in 'range' for a GRB? Even if it is "in range", it would take 1600 years for the GRB effects to reach earth. Why would the Titan's wait that long?

Even if the black hole were on the outermost edge of the Solar system, just outside the Oort cloud, it would take a full year before the GRB reached the sun, let alone the opposite side of the system. Furthermore, if they could get a black hole that close or even desired to, then the black hole itself would serve just fine as a very simple way of destroying the entire system, with little need for further manipulation... a black hole is already a pretty dangerous entity.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

I wonder what your source is for that, since Hawking himself theorized that gradually black holes will lose energy and mass through background radiation until they effectively cease to be. There is no reason to assume the Scharzschild Radius is a fixed position that can't be altered by local gravitational fields. If you put one gravitational field next to another, they counter each other (which is why we have Legrange Points). If you create a Legrange Point within the original Scharzschild Radius, that means anything outside of that point has either no or negative gravitational pull relative to the black hole. In a nut shell, you use your gravitational source to shave the edge of the black hole. Assuming we're just using spheres, most of the freed mass will get pulled into either of the two sources of gravity, but there is a plane where the mass will travel relatively free of gravitational impedence for long enough to escape beyond the event horizon (especially if one or both gravitational sources are rotating). It wouldn't be a very precise weapon, but you would be getting a LOT of energy out.

Actually there is. The Schwarzchild Radius, AKA the event horizon, is a radius around the singularity based on just one variable - the mass of the singularity. That's all. The radius based on it's mass. Add other mass outside this, add extra gravity, add ice-cream and sprinkles, you will not change the SR unless you change the mass of the singularity. Local gravity does not affect mass - it affects weight, but not mass and the only way you can affect the mass of the singularity is to inject matter into it since you can't remove matter from it (since it's within the Schwarzchild radius, which is defined by being the radius from within which NOTHING can escape). The SR/EH is defined that it is the limit where it is impossible for a particle to escape the gravitational attraction of the singularity. Impossible. That means that a massless particle traveling at the universal ultimate speed, the speed of light, cannot escape from the singularity. This is the most energetic thing in the universe - no mass, ultimate speed. You cannot add energy to it - it's going as fast as it can. And it still can't escape the singularity. The singularity is the crunchy centre (or maybe ring for a spinning black hole) at the middle of the area within the EH. Anything within that will fall into the singularity. You can't create a Lagrange point with the Schwarzchild radius as everything within it is infalling towards the singularity - everything, no matter the mass or energy of it. If there is a force acting upon it from outside of the SR it won't be enough to stop it from infalling, since if it was it wouldn't be inside the SR... The equation is (from Wikipedia): r=2GM/c^2 - which gives a proportionally constant of about 2.95km/Solar mass (squash the sun into a ball of less than 2.95 KM and it will collapse to a singularity as it can't escape it's own gravity) Also, Hawking radiation is not the removal of mass from the black hole in the sense that you are scooping stuff out, but the apparent reduction in energy (and thus mass) due to the infall of a negative particle, from a virtual pair from the quantum "foam", and the apparent emission to a distant observer of its corresponding particle. Large black holes may not evaporate at all, as their intake of matter may be higher than the rate of evaporation. Hawking radiation is the evaporation by the addition of a negative, not the subtraction of a positive. Tiny black hole evaporate very, very quickly - micro black holes may br popping into existence all the time and evaporating. It may also not exist. What adding an external gravity source [i]will[/i] do is help out those particles who aren't so furtunate as to be massless speeding bullets, though. The SR is based on it being impossible for a particle to ever escape - but there will be areas outside the SR where slower, more massive particles can be made to avoide the infalling and escape if given an energy boost by a nearby massive attractor. G.

icekatze wrote:

hi hi GJD: I am afraid your analysis may be flawed. Schwarzchild's equations are based on theoretical ideal circumstances, they are not universal absolutes that exist without regard to circumstance. They describe the spacetime surround a spherically symmetric, non-rotating, uncharged massive object only. They do not take into account the possibility of multiple massive bodies in close proximity.

I don't believe it is in within the framework of this discussion. The calculations are indeed different for charged and rotating bodies, but even so they don't have to take into account multiple massive bodies since you are calculating the radius from which gravitation attraction is unescapable [b]for a given mass[/b]. A nearby massive body will not affect that radius, although, of course there will be attraction between the two, and both will, of course affect particles outside of their Schwarzchild Radiuss proportional to the distance away from each of them. However, once you hit the Schwarzchild radius, there is no escpae, regardless of nearby masses. That's the WHOLE point of the equation. I'm also well aware of what gravity and electromagnetism are and how they interact. Particles gain energy or lose energy, in the form of kinetic energy, through spacetime curvature - not much, since gravity is so weak a force - but that's the ONLY way you hupothetical nearby mass is going to affect an infalling particle. I think the idea that you could have a supermassive object nearby that would bend spacetime enough to reverse a singularity is flawed. You would need a huge ammount of mass to create enough spacetime curvature - since gravity is such a weak force - that I think it would end up infalling or collapsing to within it's own Schwarzchild Radius. But, again, all of this seems like an awfully long winded way of designing a TITAN WMD. I understand the need for the wow factor, and a certain degree of scientific verisimilitude, but the TITANS seem to be ruthlessly efficent and this all seems to be rather resource intensive when they could find easier ways of doing it. I can see a certain sinister granduer in having players in a position to observe a black hole and some macroengineerring project to turn it into a cosmic claymore mine, just not sure about the usability. But then, as ever, it's your game. Go for what seems right. G.

icekatze wrote:

hi hi The point of this thread was to see what other people thought about it. Perhaps it was a mistake on my part to argue the point, though I do find the topic interesting. While scientists have experimental data to support Hawking Radiation it is still probably too early to tell. Perhaps some day we'll find out which of the various theories about black holes are right. (Personally, I'm rooting for string theory fuzz balls) But that won't really help our discussion here and now. The point was to gauge how my players might respond to the premise, and so far it seems like there will be some discontent over the topic. I suppose it will be in my best interest to leave the mechanics of the device vague and force the players to come up with more social solutions to the problem.

Absolutly. I can totally see that using a black hole as the engine for some kind of device has menace, granduer and the ability to inspire awe. My suggestion is that you do leave the actual mechanics vague and incomprehensible, with enough information to impart the threat. G.