FUTURE TECH
Interstellar flight will need a tremendous amount of energy, but we may be able to store it in a miniature black hole
Interstellar distances are difficult to conceive. Our nearest star is Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf that lies 4.3 light years away – that’s more than 266,000 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. Even if our fastest spacecraft, Voyager 1, which is flying at 18 kilometres (11 miles) per second, were headed that way, it would still take 80,000 years to get there. For humans to be able to explore the galaxy, we are going to need another way to travel, but while the focus has been on the propulsion side of the puzzle, equally challenging is how we power such journeys. But there’s a strange concept that might solve both problems: the Schwarzschild kugelblitz, a craft powered by a black hole.
To make interstellar journeys in a reasonable time, we will have to achieve a good percentage of the speed of light, which is around 300,000,000 metres (984,252,000 feet) per second. For every kilogram of mass that makes up the composition of a spacecraft and its payload, when travelling at 99.9 per cent the speed of light it will have a kinetic energy more than six times that contained in the 1961 Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. All of this energy must be safely stored in a form that can be built into a spacecraft and supplied to the prospective starship without destroying it.
Writing in 1955, American physicist John Wheeler – believed to have coined the terms ‘black hole’, ‘wormhole’ and ‘quantum foam’ – proposed that if enough energy could be concentrated into a small space, the energy would form a microscopic black hole. He nicknamed this concept the kugelblitz – meaning ‘ball lightning’ in German – and as a black hole is defined by being mass-energy squashed so that its gravity won’t let light escape, compressed within the Schwarzschild radius, it has become known as the Schwarzschild kugelblitz.
Counterintuitively, black holes actually produce radiation. It was first proposed by Stephen Hawking in 1974 that when quantum fluctuations happen next to the event horizon of a black hole, it leads to the creation of two particles, but instead of the particles annihilating each other, one gets sucked into the black hole, letting the other escape. Because of the conservation of energy
