Singularity Bombs?

[monophonic]

2 hours ago, Technical Ben said:

If you can create/change gravity, then you could create a temporary black hole or gravity like field. Depends how you are breaking science, physics and logic as to how it would "work".

Or just disable gravity in/on/at/?? the target planet and watch it break itself apart with rotational forces. Would make a beautiful if explosionally deficient end of a world.

13 minutes ago, andrewas said:

The black hole weighs billions of tons and has a cross section smaller than an atom. If it hits regular matter, the interaction is too small to transfer any significant momentum. If the black hole was on an orbital trajectory it would eventually slow down and settle at the core, though it its light enough it will evaporate long before that. But a black hole moving quickly enough to escape won't even notice the planet on its way through. 

The planet, on the other hand, would certainly notice the sudden appearance of a hole running throug it. The radius of which would uncannily match the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole in question.

[andrewas]

A hole less than a nanometer across isn't going to do anything. 

[daniel l.]

I have a question, How massive would a black hole have to be in order to shatter a planet upon detonation of it's singularity. And how long would it take for it to explode?

[radonek]

45 minutes ago, monophonic said:

The planet, on the other hand, would certainly notice the sudden appearance of a hole running throug it.

I don't think it's possible. Singularity with weight of Earth would be less then 1cm. Simple pressure would seal hole if this size quickly. Any planet with active volcanism have waay bigger holes in it. And, singularity big enough to make hole that would actually matter would be of stellar size - it would first just shred planet to pieces and swallow it.

15 minutes ago, daniel l. said:

I have a question, How massive would a black hole have to be in order to shatter a planet upon detonation of it's singularity. And how long would it take for it to explode?

Mass does not matter, bigger black hole would just longer to evaporate. The "explosion" is just final stage when weight approaches zero and evaporation process skyrockets.
 

[daniel l.]

Just now, radonek said:

Mass does not matter, bigger black hole would just longer to evaporate. The "explosion" is just final stage when weight approaches zero and evaporation process skyrockets.

What i mean is what kind of black hole would it take to destroy or seriously damage a planet, And how long would it take for it to decay and explode.

[kerbiloid]

12 hours ago, radonek said:

14 hours ago, todofwar said:

Do black holes pass through objects without hitting them?

Do stones pass through fog?

A great idea, btw. Why do they always describe a black hole from pov of the external world.
Why they don't describe the external world from pov of black hole. I.e. if treat the black hole as something constant, while that's the external world getting dematerialized.

[radonek]

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

…while that's the external world getting dematerialized.

No that's completely wrong idea of situation. Black hole sucking up matter is of no importance here, it is just very dense object meeting less dense one. If you used piece of neutron matter (stuff that pulsars are made of) effect would be same. It would just fall through and come out of other side with a small strand of captured matter trailing it. (but that matter would probably shine pretty bright while settling into accretion disc). Black holes ability to devour stuff is greatly exaggerated, while it's ability to shred stuff via tidal forces are underestimated.
 

[p1t1o]

16 hours ago, daniel l. said:

What i mean is what kind of black hole would it take to destroy or seriously damage a planet, And how long would it take for it to decay and explode.

 

Energy required to reduce Earth to a cloud of rubble:

2.2405e32J

or 2.4928e15kg of mass-energy

Source (contains a lot of data pertinent to questions like this):

https://qntm.org/destroy 

https://qntm.org/data

 

Since an evaporating black hole converts its mass into energy quite efficiently, the black hole required to do this needs a mass, at minimum, of 2.4928e15kg

 

Plugged into this calculator: http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/

Gives these stats:

Radius = 3.7e-12m or 0.0037nm (nanometres, not nautical miles)

Temperature = 49million Kelvin

Lifetime = 4.13e22 years

Power output = 57 Watts

 

In other words, you cannot blow up the Earth with a singularity bomb, as a singularity with enough energy will evaporate too slowly and exist as a very hot, very small object that will emit its mass-energy over about 40,000 billion billion years...

Dropping one into the centre of the Earth would...do absolutely nothing. In fact, there could even be one there now. There could be thousands and we'd never know.

 

Extrapolating from the above, you could, I suppose, use a large number of smaller singularities, ones with a short enough lifespan to go "bang" when you want them too.

But this is one of those questions where if it has an answer, it is meaningless due to the context. Ie: if you have the ability to reliably manipulate something that about the size of an atomic nucleus, but with more mass than mount everest, you can probably destroy the Earth with whatever it is you use to make your dinner. Or by ordering the appropriate equipment from hyper-amazon.

Edited October 17, 2016 by p1t1o
accuracy/grammar

[Technical Ben]

20 hours ago, monophonic said:

Or just disable gravity in/on/at/?? the target planet and watch it break itself apart with rotational forces. Would make a beautiful if explosionally deficient end of a world.

The planet, on the other hand, would certainly notice the sudden appearance of a hole running throug it. The radius of which would uncannily match the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole in question.

You may wish to read: https://qntm.org/destroy

It covers that idea I think and some others. Really good read, in a funny kind of way.

[ps]

Those ninjas beat me to it! Thanks p1t1o!

Edited October 17, 2016 by Technical Ben

[radonek]

3 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Power output = 57 Watts

Umm, no, it does not work like this. Plug 1 ton mass into that calculator and see where it gets you.
 

[p1t1o]

3 minutes ago, radonek said:

Umm, no, it does not work like this. Plug 1 ton mass into that calculator and see where it gets you.
 

Hmm? Work like what? All the math is laid out there for you. What were you expecting?

Ok I plugged in 1 ton. Everything seems in order. Now what?

[Technical Ben]

Um. I think we are mixing ideas somewhere. Making a black hole requires energy. It is not all released instantly. A smaller black hole is more dangerous (explosively... um, no... luminously?) than a large one.

The large black hole above only emits around 57 watts of Hawkins radiation, and takes a forever to evaporate.

So, using our "smaller is more dangerous" example, put in as possibly fictional "black hole grenade" that implodes just 1 gram of matter past it's Schwarzschild limit. What power does it output (you may be surprised).

As a hint, one tone emits roughly the same as the sun does in luminosity (I'm assuming 1 second? I'm not sure on that list or the physics ).

How you would do so, well that would involve fictional forces or technology.

 

[edit]

I wrote/posted this before p1t1o mentioned their post, so I could instead reference 1 ton just for an easy match of data (1 tone to around 1 solar luminosity to a size less than a femtometer). But then our fictional grenade becomes a massive bomb... though less dangerous.

Edited October 17, 2016 by Technical Ben

[p1t1o]

To be clear, a 1 ton singularity may emit at a very high power, it will still only liberate 1ton of mass-energy (about 9e19J, equivalent to about 21.5 Gigatons TNT) and thus will not blow up the Earth either (Assuming a cloud of rubble is the desired definition of "blown up").

Definitely enough to glass one hemisphere though.

Edited October 17, 2016 by p1t1o

[Technical Ben]

That is the problem though. A black hole large enough, would evaporate slowly, right? So we need to go for something smaller, less energy but quickly released. Unless we wish to destroy the earth via global warming [into a molten candle].

[PB666]

On 10/15/2016 at 6:21 PM, daniel l. said:

Imagine though, If you were to have a machine capable of instantly collapsing any object within a certain size into a black hole, If you collapsed an asteroid just before it hit a planet then you could wipe that planet off the map.

I just created 1 ton black hole thats going to die quickly (a folly in an of itself for several reasons). OK 9E19 J.  Lets see how many kilowatts if its all released in a second. That is 10^7 megawatt, 10^4 terawatt, 10 pentawatt. Now consider this

Suppose that went into expanding 170'K to 270'K atmosphere, say 100'K. Thats a pretty big sphere at 14 PSI of ground pressure. Its 10s of kilometers wide. But our atmosphere is only about 100km i height. Now you heat something by 100'k and its going to flow up 10s of kilometers into space some of that is moving 1000 m/s maybe 3000 m/s second.

So lets say you bombed someplace like siberia, you have a shock wave that reaches out 100s of kilometers. Not to bad, sure the mongolians were not doing anything exciting on that day, other than waiting for the unexpected reindeer to fly over. But then, what is doing the expansion, well you started out with X-rays, they created the pressure wave like  inside the hydrogen bomb that ignited the matrix. But then you had gamma, then high energy gamma and then ultra-high energy gamma. You don't have to worry about the X-rays however, thats for a bigger black hole, for this 1 ton black hole all you have left are the very high energy gammas. These little babies interact with just about any kind of particle to create new matter. Not necessarily pretty matter like hydrogen, but at then end of its life gamma is so energetic that it is creating the kind quarks that are not observed commonly on earth (except after cosmic rays collide with our upper atmosphere). But here you are making massive amounts of these, these gamma do not interact with just electrons, but prefer nuclei and other exotic matter. Remember de broglie wavelength, bound mass increase wavelength decreases. Which means very small wavelengths like to interact with bigger massed nuclei and subatomic particles. So now your gamma is hitting oxygen, nitrogen, argon, and its making new particles out of them, and its doing this 10s of kilometers up in the atmosphere, and in fact its creating its own high altitude weather to distribute these all around the Earth. Eventually these suckers are so energetic only the 50 % that hit the earths surface are absorbed, Problem is that they are creating radioactive metal particles that will decay into other things that wafe of into the atmosphere and everyone will be taking their iodine pills and particle masks.

Bombs are bad ideas. We use them
Atomic bombs are worse ideas, we used them a couple times.
Hydrogen bombs really bad in terms of radioactivity. We thought we could reuse ships that were nuked, turns out the radioactivity was to high for even momentary exposure.

The problem with devices that have atomic level energy densities is a critical issue in weapon making.

Weapons want to convert stored energy into mechanical work (a shock wave). Atomic energy densities convert stored energy into many new and exotic things, and also a shock wave. You bomb someone and assume control of their territory. The ultimate goal of a weapon is generally not to bomb someone and then be forced by the bomb to abandon that territory or that planet.

 

 

[kerbiloid]

Suddenly they will realize that the "dark matter" is a powder of micro black holes scattered around, and feel a little b...brainhurt...

[p1t1o]

On 10/17/2016 at 11:05 PM, PB666 said:

<snip>

Are you seriously messing up a discussion of using black holes as weapons with talk about why?!

Come on, this is villainy 101, you should know better...

[Technical Ben]

But it's more a meta "why". So it does fit. One of the massive problems in Sci-fi is using "planet killers", like... kills everything. That leaves you with only 2 options, either as a defence to kill off an army, or a "revenge" bad guy of insane proportions who just wants to destroy everything.

However, most don't want the "good guys" being a warring power, and don't want them using the bomb, so are left with the "it was an insane person with a superweapon". In reality, being insane makes it hard to build/use/steal such a weapon. It does not happen IRL. IRL the atom bombs were used as a deterrent to war. To stop it, not wipe out all life everywhere (though it did locally).

At least that's what I found worse about the latest Star Trek reboots. All these superweapons, and how/why people used them was pointless and nonsensical. Yet, say something like Oblivion made more sense (spoilers warning ), it was to make the resource gathering easier and without interference.

Though I risk hitting the same problem with my own Sci-Fi ideas at times. Anyhow, we all know a singularity bomb is the best way to make popcorn.

[p1t1o]

In the Greg Bear Forge of God/Anvil of Stars duology (duology?) there is quite a good treatise on motives on planet killing. It is limited to the case of self-replicating planet killers due to their indiscriminate nature, but could be extrapolated to any planet killing tech. It boiled down to something like: The mere creation of these weapons is a civilisation-level capital offence and any civilisation building these weapons must be annihilated before they can deploy anything, or more usually, tracked down after the fact - even millenia after the fact. Not doing so, or issuing a less severe-than-total-obliteration punishment, risks being too late/too little to stop offensive action.

I feel like i have explained that badly, but they are great books.

Spoilers:

Spoiler

In the story, Earth is annihilated. A team of humans is given a ship and weaponry (by essentially a voluntary "space police") and they eventually find the perpetrators. The scope is such that the perpetrators deliberately develop/encourage several large civilisations on their homeworld as a kind of mega-level "human shield". Several civilisations totalling many trillions of beings are annihilated. It is implied that the cultural complexity of this collection is deliberately enhanced in order to discourage revenge attacks, which *almost* works.

In the end, they confirm that they did indeed have replicating planet killers still in storage and are responsible for the destruction of multiple other races over the course of thousands of years.

 

1 hour ago, Technical Ben said:

At least that's what I found worse about the latest Star Trek reboots. All these superweapons, and how/why people used them was pointless and nonsensical. Yet, say something like Oblivion made more sense (spoilers warning ), it was to make the resource gathering easier and without interference.

Oblivion ran smack-into the old "If you are significantly space-faring, conquering an inhabited planet is by far the hardest way to obtain *any* resource. Especially water!" (Even now we are investigating the prospect of acquiring resources from off-world, and we already *have* a planet!) But I respect the movie for "owning" it and being generally quite imaginative.

Edited October 19, 2016 by p1t1o

[Technical Ben]

Oh, yeah there were better places. But it explained why it wanted to annihilate people, as suppose to the entire planet (perhaps it just feared they would still "get" it if it mined Europa... which it probably was doing before they met it)... not to mention if it even got corrupted by the humans signals/tech/responses and "learnt" war.

But more on topic, singularity and "bomb" are oxymorons.