Will Black Holes Power the Future?

oh hello i'm award-winning science communicator and the netflix adaptation of thor kyle hill before we get into black hole machines today i want to tell you about today's sponsor my new favorite thing to do in my browser aside from complain about stuff on the internet prosperous universe imagine you are the ceo of your own space faring company after all life on earth is destroyed humanity struggled for decades to make a new foothold in the universe and now you along with other real players will build a galactic economy together do you deliver titanium to critical industries across the void or do you make the ships that transport do you make an alliance with another real player to deliver medical supplies or do you wait until disaster occurs to sell your shares fairness no grind and realism are the name of the game when it comes to this free to play browser-based sci-fi economy simulator and the name of the game is prosperous universe if you want to check it out go down into the description or go to prosperousuniverse.com sign up check out how awesome it is please trade me some helium 3. we can get to today's episode now but i really need that everything here is powered by it in 1963 a mathematician out of new zealand named roy kerr discovered an exact solution to einstein's equations of general relativity a solution that fully described the geometry of a spinning black hole celestial bodies much weirder than their more stationary counterparts space and time act so funky around these bodies in fact that in theory a sufficiently advanced human civilization could utilize this weird space-time and siphon energy from it powering their i don't know jet packs and flying cars and whatnot but how could you make a black hole machine arya take us in if we spend any more time out here the time dilation is going to make us like 50 years younger than the rest they're all going to look gross when we get back now entering the facility one of the most dramatic scientific insights in human history was albert einstein's realization that space is not quite as empty as it seems rather it has an underlying structure to it a somethingness of fourth dimensionality that we now call space-time space-time affects and is affected by every object and particle in the universe for example objects within this space-time follow its curvature to know how to move and how to accelerate and those same objects create that curvature through their influence now in everyday life you don't notice this underlying structure but if you start moving fast enough or you get near something so incredibly massive enough like a black hole that's when things start to get weird like science weird the weirdest kind of weird the geeky among you may already know the basic structure of a non-rotating black hole and what happens when so much mass is in such a small space that nothing can escape time slows down objects can be stretched into molecular spaghetti it's literally a wound in the universe where space-time is falling faster than light in all directions whoa the point of no return is known as the event horizon the actual thing not like the movie that's not as good as you remember which hides the physics breaking singularity from any attempt to see it this is a very simplified look at your classic black hole one that isn't moving but like a figure skater that pulls her arms in during a spin to spin faster a star that's collapsing to become a black hole can be spinning in the first place so when all that mass comes together in that small space you can end up with a black hole that is spinning at an unbelievable and unimaginable rate so quickly in fact that it can bring space-time itself along with it arya prepare me the bowl of science honey and meet me outside in your drone you want me to prepare the what what you don't think i can explain spinning black holes with just a bowl of honey i can eave little faith that i guess i programmed myself so it's my fault i'll see you outside recall that we said that space-time has an underlying structure to it a somethingness that affects and is affected by objects and what they do within this medium well today we're gonna represent that somethingness and what it does around spinning black holes with a big bowl of honey and a tennis ball it works okay so obviously the black hole here is our tennis ball the honey will stand in as our space time and now i will add some food coloring to this honey to represent two different objects at two different distances from this spinning black hole [Music] now we're going to actually spin it and watch what happens see how one object is moved around the spinning black hole and the other is not just through the black hole's influence this is an area around our spinning black hole where space time is being literally dragged yes drag it drag drag space time um guess what our little demonstration here actually occurs in the wider universe when space-time structure encounters the near light speed spin of a rotating black hole it can be dragged around it actually spun like our honey here in what's called frame dragging or frame of reference dragging and it occurs in an area outside of the event horizon called the ergosphere and now that you have some of that physics in your head and these terms we can start thinking about making a black hole machine arya take us back with your drone body okay so we're pretty close to actually conceptualizing a black hole machine in our minds but first we just need a little bit more spinning black hole physics but if you stay with me you'll know more than 99 of the human population does about black holes and you can brag about that feel free to brag about that if you're close enough to a spinning black hole to be in the area where space itself is dragging an outside observer like you looking at me is going to see me move if the space time here isn't moving very fast in theory i could move in this space-time in the opposite direction against the flow to make myself appear as though i were stationary but if the space-time we're dragging along at the speed of light which it can outside of spinning black holes then there's no way i could ever appear stationary because nothing with mass like myself can move at or beyond that speed the exact distance from the center of a spinning black hole at which it is impossible to appear stationary to outside observers is the start of the ergosphere we mentioned before and simulated with honey and this is where the weird stuff i keep mentioning happens because space-time at the ergosphere is literally moving at light speed even something moving at the speed of light like a photon has to immediately change paths in this flowing space-time encounter in this way the ergosphere is kind of like the event horizon but for movement perhaps even weirder than this is that because space-time itself the underlying structure of the universe itself is moving objects falling into a black hole in this way can have a negative energy it sounds like science fiction but it's real i mean look you're looking at a graph that means it's real graphs are the ultimate proof of anything now finally we know everything that we need to know to make a black hole machine and you should never again feel nervous at a cocktail party just bring up all the black hole physics you know now i'm sure it will go over great now because both energy and momentum are still conserved even in this weird spinning space time there is a situation in which which was first proposed by sir roger penrose in 1969 nice an object could enter an ergosphere and then leave with more energy than it started with so for example consider a mast that could separate itself into two halves with like a rocket or an explosion or something like that the mass enters the ergosphere and then at a certain point it detaches one half spirals down into the event horizon with negative energy and the other half follows a specific trajectory out of the ergosphere with more energy than it enter with this is because since momentum and energy are still conserved the black hole got some negative energy in this exchange so to equal everything out the leaving piece needs to have more energy this is the penrose process and this is how you steal energy from a spinning black hole and this is also why the ergosphere is called the ergosphere ergo is greek for work the work sphere and whenever a system can do work on an object that's something that scientists and engineers can take advantage of are we just not going to talk about that you actually have drones no it's what that's fine the drones aren't going to be coming for all them probably today probably it's fine just last year over 50 years since sir roger penrose first proposed stealing energy from a spinning black hole a paper was published experimentally verifying the penrose process so we know this is really possible yes there are some theoretical limits on how much a single particle can steal from a black hole in this way based on a percentage of its rest mass and equations and blah blah blah blah but it means that everything we've talked about today it is an engineering problem to power an advanced human civilization with a black hole not a theoretical one that's amazing think of in the far far future some halo-like ring structures around a spinning black hole that lowered masses down into it to spin electrical turbines and get energy or an entire civilization living on the outside of a black hole in an arcology that threw down its waste mass into the black hole and they would come back up and spin turbines and again get electricity or something and there's even more complicated designs than this but the idea is the same powering a human civilization on a spinning black hole is something that we could really do if we don't destroy ourselves in like the next 50 years and it would still make for a pretty prosperous universe ha ha i see what you did there oh brought it back around now exiting the facility thank you so much to the vera nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i want to recognize research assistant quad fonic and visiting scholar jeremy alva if you want to join the facility if you want to drape on a silky white lab coat if you want to talk with me every day on discord get behind the scenes photos see videos early get monthly private live streams with me not like that you can go to patreon.com kyle hill to join the facility today and hey if you support us just enough get your name on aria here each and every video and as you can see there's literally hundreds and hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass it again thanks to prosperous universe for sponsoring today's episode it's a very cool game great time sync and you get to learn a little bit of stuff and before you go down into the comments i know that kurzgazat or how whatever you say it already did a video like this there can be more than one thing about things interesting to know that the penrose process that we were discussing today actually appeared on the big screen they used it an interstellar to fling themselves around gargantua it it's almost like the advisors and script supervisors for that movie were really smart in fact one of them just won a nobel prize one of the most scientifically interesting movies of all time except for the gr what if gravity was love part okay catwoman okay thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 245,924

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, chernobyl, black hole, black holes, penrose process, black hole machine, interstellar, the universe

Id: Kf3d82tBXyY

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021