now we're not going to talk about this specific black hole engine but i can tell you
about another one which is super cool there's only one conceivable technology that we have
that could create such a thing so let's talk about this space elevator how realistic is it
what's going on everyone my name is dylan sands i'm a physicist from the land down under
and currently doing research in astrophysics i'm working on my first paper i am a baby within
academia and just getting started so make sure you subscribe to follow my journey i'll be making all
sorts of kinds of videos in the future but for now we're just doing some reaction videos and today
we're checking out foundation i've been waiting for this show for a while now because it's written
by isaac asimov it's one of my favorite book series ever and a fun little fact before we start
but uh you might recall when elon launched his tesla roadster into space a few years back well
he actually put these little crystal like storage devices in that car that contained
all of the foundation books which is awesome in its own right but it's even
awesomer when you realize how relevant that is to this story i'm not going to
spoil anything i'll let you guys figure that out for yourselves
these visuals are just incredible well the graph generators are put away from that corrupts the
drum drives ability to plot four dimensional points at trans-dimensional speeds what i've got
no idea what any of that meant no i caught some of the words but the trans-dimensional that's not a
real thing bro you claim your plan can reduce the coming darkness an encyclopedia galactica
after the fall a civilization climbs from the ashes a foundation they won't have to reinvent
the wheel the knowledge will already exist the good old encyclopedia galactica if you've watched
any carl sagan you would have come across this thing he loved talking about that and uh the
golden record on voyager and voyager 1 and 2 are kind of like our calling card to if there is a
encyclopedia galactica already out there which there very well could be
who knows maybe there's like a wi-fi link to the encyclopedia galactica that we just haven't found
yet you know and maybe it's only in certain parts of the galaxy it's definitely a possibility and
i'm only talking about our little island our galaxy the milky way there's a whole lot of
islands in a vast ocean out there with you know voids in between it's definitely possibly
something going on somewhere else in the universe and i think it would be a great idea
to start building up some kind of backup like an encyclopedia galactica for just our species
yes it is i'm a bit nervous how's the new zealand accent on it synax picked up just
ahead of it in your accent fish and chips bro australians can do kiwi accents pretty well
no why i only know that because i've read the books your lips were moving yeah um when
i'm nervous i can't primes so she's basically a computer because that would be like impossible um
and if you don't know what's so special about prime numbers they're kind of called like the
atoms of math the atoms of numbers at least that's because you can build every other number from
prime numbers multiplying them together so they're like the hydrogen and oxygen of numbers as she was
proposing a radical theory about rings of integers and non-archimedean local fields
rings of images non can't say i know what those are a mathematician in there watching this
help me out in the comments it's probably probably no mathematicians left because
i said that people get into math because they like puzzles and [ __ ] in one of my videos
so i imagine that they would have left the room but um on the topic of math though i
don't show much of it in these videos and there's a very specific reason for that math
is just a tool and one should learn to hold the physical concepts in one's mind without
reference to the mathematical form that's a quote by dirac that looks pretty cool that looks like it
is that a black hole nice now we're not going to talk about this specific black hole engine
but i can tell you about another one which is super cool there's actually quite a few ideas
around how we can use black holes and to get energy from them and theoretically it's possible
but there's some limitations so this what this engine involves something called a kugel blitz
which literally translates to ball lightning and a famous physicist in the 50s john wheeler basically
predicted that if you could dump enough energy into a specific region of space you
could create a microscopic black hole that would be described by the equations of schwarzschild
so this is what we call a schwarzschild kugelblitz or an sk and then like 20 years after that stephen
hawking realized that quantum mechanical effects around black holes specifically on its event
horizon that region which you know not even light can escape if you go near it your bloody stuffed
it would be emitting some radiation this region uh called hawking radiation uh we're not going
to go too much into it the weird stuff about this hawking radiation is that the smaller
the black hole the greater this radiation so for these engines it would actually be better to have
a microscopic black hole we don't know if these microscopic black holes even exist
if they do they probably evaporate pretty quickly and now if you bring together these two ideas you
know the schwarzschild kugelblitz by wheeler and hawking's radiation well you can imagine a
new type of interstellar spacecraft one that's fed by the power of a kugel blitz to be useful
though these things would have to be small enough to emit enough radiation that we can use that have
to be light enough that we so we can reasonably accelerate it and that also have to be large
enough so it doesn't evaporate instantaneously so you'd probably need one like smaller than even a
proton and that sounds pretty small right it would still be really heavy like two giant skyscraper
buildings that's how heavy it would still be but if you work this out you get a nice amount
of energy it works out to be new york city's uh 2013 july's energy consumption times 10 million
then there's also the problem of energy efficiency like if you capture 100 of the energy if you
imagine something called a dyson shell we're not going to go into what that is but it's like
this little shell you encase the black hole in um let's just imagine it gives you 100 percent energy
efficiency you're capturing all of it well within the five-year lifetime of this proton size sk
well you could actually reach about 72 percent the speed of light so with that sort of speed within a
human lifetime you could actually reach a few of the stars in the solar neighborhood so it's still
you can you can see the problem we're facing with the vastness of space and the you know the limit
of the speed of light before you can extract this energy from the sk you need to be able to make it
and that's another problem there's only one conceivable technology that we have that
could create such a thing and that's a gamma ray laser small problem the output frequency of the
laser would be roughly a billion times greater than what our current technology can produce
and the pulse duration would be about 100 billion times shorter than what we can currently achieve
so problematic which means the total energy of a single laser pulse from this thing would be
equivalent to the amount of energy the sun puts out in one tenth of a second this might all sound
really crazy but it's really awesome and i truly believe this stuff might just one day take us to
the stars it's pretty sad that we're not going to be around to see it i know trust me i know
but you know what it's we still have the dream and the end of the day that's all that matters
space elevator another thing that's in every sci-fi book
14 hours it's about the same time it takes to get to australia from just about anywhere
so let's talk about this space elevator how realistic is it might actually surprise you
and there's some new ideas out there um like i said i've read so much of this stuff in sci-fi
it is ridiculous but um there's it's actually a pretty great idea so let me explain so normally
you know we get into space by uh rockets everyone knows that but in australia we actually just untie
our spaceships and uh they just fall into space but if you're not lucky enough to be in australia
well it's gonna cost you about ten thousand dollars just to get a single kilogram into space
it's not cheap and not to mention all the waste and propellant and all the greenhouse gases that
come along with it when you're trying to get something into space from you know rockets uh
these space elevators could be completely powered by solar energy they're always going to be you
know have the sun available right there and but there is problems the major problem being that
you know what's this material going to be made out of it would need to be really strong and uh
if we can ever make carbon nanotubes long enough possibly but it doesn't look like there really is
any material that will be strong enough because we still don't have materials strong enough
to support a space elevator well a couple of physicists recently come up with another idea
it's a space elevator with a bit of a twist and they call it space line um and it would actually
be would be able to make it with commercially available materials right now and it would
measure in the billions to make which really isn't that much in my opinion the conventional space
elevator idea consists of a cable anchored to the ground that would extend past geosynchronous
orbit which is about 42 000 kilometers above the earth the cable is going to need a lot of mass
and at the other end you're going to need something with again a lot of mass to balance the
whole thing and stop it from falling down which will be in orbit and this whole thing will stay
stay together because of centrifugal force so the twist in this new idea is instead of anchoring it
to earth you'd actually anchor it to the moon and dangle it towards earth the space
line would inevitably pass through a region where earth's gravity and the moon's gravity essentially
cancel out and this is known as the lagrange point and we could set up like a nice base there
and do all sorts of cool research and they're actually suggesting a proof of principal device
that would be about the same thickness as a lead pencil made of this xylon stuff that will stretch
from the moon to geosynchronous orbit that's going to save so much money and it would just be
extremely cool at the lagrange point you could build like particle accelerators
in telescopes gravitational wave detectors all sorts of cool stuff so if there's any bitcoin
billionaires watching space elevators imagine the tourism thanks for watching guys make sure
you like and subscribe leave me a comment down under if you have any good suggestions
for things that i can watch i'm thinking about doing the expanse next there's been a lot of
comments about that one so let me know down under i'll catch you guys next time