Well if the ideas about Hawking radiation are right, then the tiniest "lab sized" black holes would quickly dissipate in a tiny fraction of a second. In the last second it dissipates 1000 times the total nuclear arsenal of all the nations on Earth. So it would be a somewhat hazardous thing to have around in your lab :).
Here's a nice table from
Frank Heile's answer to What would the "death" of a black hole look like? I've read that black holes lose mass due to Hawking Radiation ("evaporation"). Is it possible for a black hole to eventually lose all its mass?
- the time it will take for a black hole to finish evaporating and explode,
- the instantaneous power that will be output at the beginning of that time period,
- all as a function of the mass of the black hole. This table uses a convenient "blue whale" mass unit ([math]2.2 \times 10^5[/math] kg) for the mass of the black hole. The power unit is in terms of the total energy per second that the Sun delivers to the surface of the Earth:
So - I suppose if you are asking, how to safely handle a black hole, well I suppose the thing is to keep it at a size where it can't swallow up the Earth.
At the mass of a blue whale, it would evaporate in one second, but in that time it could fall into the Earth if you let go of it by mistake. How much matter could it absorb in that second, could it absorb enough to counteract the explosion? Whether or not, that explosion, converting a blue whale's mass directly into energy, doesn't seem like something you'd survive in the lab.
So probably you'd want to keep it rather smaller than that. But then increasingly difficult to keep it supplied with matter, hesitate for a fraction of a second and it would evaporate.
And actually - well the smaller it is, the more matter you have to supply every second to keep it in its steady state configuration, and the brighter it is in its steady state and more energy it produces.
Still, I can imagine some far future tech where you use mini black holes to convert matter directly into energy. Feed a constant stream of matter into a very tiny black hole, just a few kg, levitated magnetically, say (because black holes can be given an electric charge, so could be held in place against gravity using magnetic fields). It's going to evaporate completely in a fraction of a second, but if you can somehow keep it supplied with matter, at high density, maybe you can stop it from evaporating, and use the Hawking radiation as a source of power. And if you can somehow create it small and keep it at that small size, there's much less energy to dissipate. Still, one kilogram of matter converted directly to energy is a lot of energy.
Probably has to be far smaller even than this. But the smaller it is, the more energy it produces, and more matter you need to supply to keep it at a steady state.
So - not sure how practical a mini black hole is. Unless you do it in a pulsed way by continually creating new mini black holes.
If you can do this in space, then far easier. Again it is reasonably safe, if you have a blue whale's mass of black hole, but in an orbit around Earth where it can't possibly get to Earth in less than a second, feed it with matter, and somehow shield it and convert to energy. If you have sufficient shielding to contain the fireball of its final disintegration, it could be a great way to convert matter directly to power. Perhaps this is how some future "star drive" would work.
If we look at the 12 days 100 blue whales one then that's going to be as much energy as hits the Earth from the sun, and you need roughly 10 times the mass of a blue whale in matter every day to keep it going. Can imagine that being sustainable as a mini sun for space colonies, and rather more controllable, though once you set it going you have to keep feeding it with matter and if you weren't able to, run out of fuel for a few days, it would quickly turn into a much brighter and much more dangerous mini black hole so you'd need contingency plans for that!
Technology far ahead of us. But given say a million years of technological development, might things like this become routine at some stage? If we are ever visited by ETs, could they be traveling in spaceships powered like this?
This all supposes Hawking radiation is real. Not confirmed. But if mini black holes are easily formed, in particle to particle collisions, and don't decay, they have to be safe as the Earth would be hit by many of them every time it is hit by an ultra high energy cosmic ray. And the sun even more so has not been swallowed up by black holes, and if they were easily formed and could swallow up planets and stars, there probably wouldn't be many of them left by now and we'd see them disappearing as we look out on the galaxy. Either very hard to form, or for some reason are not dangerous (e.g. because they travel at high speeds, or just are so small they can't absorb much matter, say an electron or two every million years or whatever).
So I don't think we need to worry at the energy levels we have at present for particle collisions for creating black holes. That was the conclusion of the physicists who evaluated this for the Large Hadron Collider.
Also interestingly, Frank Heile, says that a black hole with the mass larger than the Moon would actually be gaining in mass because its temperature would be lower than the 2.7 degrees background radiation. So instead of radiating, net effect is it absorbs radiation. Presumably closer to a star like us, with higher ambient radiation levels and equilibrium temperatures due to influence of the sun - then somewhat smaller black holes could also be stable, or gaining in mass. All supposing the Hawking calculations are correct, which is a theoretical prediction that has to be confirmed by experiment or observation before we can be sure about it.
See Frank Heile's answer to What would the "death" of a black hole look like? I've read that black holes lose mass due to Hawking Radiation ("evaporation"). Is it possible for a black hole to eventually lose all its mass?
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Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
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