At your disposal, milord...

[chasrob]

Greetings . Anyone hear of the concept of mass inflation?*
I read in a science quarterly that a 5 solar mass black hole will ramp up to 10^57 times the mass of the observable universe due to something called mass inflation. That wankerfully huge mass is completely hidden from view, inside a horizon, from the outside.
Anyhoo, I have these powerful, advanced aliens in my prose novel—SF genre. Think Xeelee or Q-like. They are sorta nonchalant about us, but the protag is powerful enough to potentially be a threat, so I was going to have them use this MI as a just-in-case weapon. My bright idea was to have them use two of these black holes, one anti-matter and the other regular, force them together, and watch them go boom.
Unfortunately I found out that M and AM BHs are exactly the same and they would just combine into a 10 solar mass BH. No freaking boom. But the idea of all that wankeriffic mass-energy... it would fit right in with overpowered beings and a grudge, eh?
Problem is, can't think of another way to weaponize it. Anyone out there have any bright ideas, or is the whole scenario too lame to live?
*a recent paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.0224 claims that mass inflation does not happen, but hey, facts… since when did they get in the way of SF?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Even if you could make it so the Matter and Anti-matter black holes actually annihilated, the energy released would travel at light-speed, so for a last-resort weapon it's kind of useless.

However, if you wanted a devastating weapon using black holes that doesn't require mass-inflation, take a page from the Magog's (from Andromeda) book: use low-mass black holes as projectiles in combat.

If, if you have your super-aliens able to do it, have them able to change the rate of mass lost due to Hawking radiation. If a one-solar-mass black hole decayed at the same speed a five-tonne black hole did, it would have a luminosity hundreds of times brighter than a galaxy.

Something to think about.

[chasrob]

That's very interesting, the change of decay speed. As powerful as a quasar, huh? What about changing a super-massive black hole weighing in at millions of solar masses? The uber aliens are like Q, they can pull it off, their tech is that advanced; they can do anything they can imagine.

That mass inflation kinda gnaws at me, tho. Few people have heard of it or used it AFAIK. And if it goes e=mc2, you're talking about in the area of 10125 Joules, enough for just about any application you can think of.

The inflated mass is supposedly undetectable, hidden from view by a horizon. The Cauchy, I think it's called. What if the aliens are able to conjure, extract, whatever, that mass from each BH --M and AM--, then bring them together before they re-collapse? Do it in a Planck time, 10-43 seconds, so they can get the annihilation going and complete in time. Since the masses are no longer within the horizon, it's a simple matter for the ubers to get them in contact and let nature take its course. They could use all that wattage to power their FTL, maybe?

[madd0ct0r]

why are you so keen to use obscure hard science to power obvious magic?

[Grumman]

Problem is, can't think of another way to weaponize it. Anyone out there have any bright ideas, or is the whole scenario too lame to live?

I'll go with "lame". Bigger is not automatically better. A solar system is about as big as you can go and still meaningfully say that things are within the sphere of influence of a single weapon. Trying to go beyond that means you need to scale an already astronomical weapon up another hundred-million-fold in power before it actually does anything new.

[chasrob]

why are you so keen to use obscure hard science to power obvious magic?

Are you saying that this belongs in the fantasy forum?

I dunno; because it helps to have an obscure gimmick to sell a ms in this SF publishing business?

[chasrob]

I'll go with "lame". Bigger is not automatically better. A solar system is about as big as you can go and still meaningfully say that things are within the sphere of influence of a single weapon. Trying to go beyond that means you need to scale an already astronomical weapon up another hundred-million-fold in power before it actually does anything new.

I just thought it was needed because the scale of the "universe" in my story was a lot bigger than solar system. Plus, the Q characters are so powerful--I thought if they wanked up the energy scale it would be a plausible explanation for their powers which border on magic. Y'know, the fact that nobody knows exactly what will happen at those extremes.

It's not the main gist of the tale. It's just a detail which I thought I would play with from another direction.

[madd0ct0r]

the thing is Chasrob, the impression I'm getting is that the only reason you're interested in the words 'mass inflation' is to add a few zeros onto a fictitious power calculation.

What if the aliens are able to conjure, extract, whatever, that mass from each BH --M and AM--, then bring them together before they re-collapse? Do it in a Planck time, 10-43 seconds, so they can get the annihilation going and complete in time. Since the masses are no longer within the horizon, it's a simple matter for the ubers to get them in contact and let nature take its course. They could use all that wattage to power their FTL, maybe?

why not just snuff out the Sun? Why not just magically switch the spin of every atom on the planet? Why not lasso two planets on incompatible orbits and laugh as they whirl through the solar system, smashing everything in their path? why not siphon off gravity from a star to use to pull you through space? Why not twist the direction gravity acts in 90 degrees? why not fire a time bomb so the entire planet blinks back into existence after the solar system has moved around to the opposite side of the galaxy? why not throw a forcefield into the sun, and encase a planet in it's very center? Why not tease out a collapsing star into a rugby ball shape so the resultant black hole is actually an infinetly long line?

if you want to have fun with physics, there's a shit ton better things you can do with your story to make the Q's look like more then a boy with a cherrybomb in a toilet.

[Simon_Jester]

Right.

Just writing them as releasing more energy does not make godlike fictional beings godlike. It's the ability to essentially ignore physical laws on a whim that accomplishes that, and which creates the sense-of-wow that makes the story worthwhile.

Also, Chasrob? Stop abbreviating things. Most of the abbreviations you're using (BH for black hole) are not universally agreed upon or accepted, which means people have to stop and puzzle out what you mean whenever you use them. I get that you're probably posting from a tablet or whatever, but if you can't be bothered to write out the words you're using, it hurts your ability to communicate. Badly.

[Cykeisme]

Let me just throw in another layman's take on things..

Normally, I'd expect most of the enemy's assets (and therefore your targets for destruction) to be concentrated on planets, or in orbit around planets. Therefore, increasing the yield of weaponry far beyond that which is necessary to completely dissociate a planetary mass is an inefficient waste. To demonstrate truly efficient weaponry and destructive capabilities, you should be showing that you can accurately target and destroy multiple planets in a solar system separately (more impressive, if you do it as near to simultaneously as possible).
Simply setting off a bigger bomb is inefficient, because planets are so widely spaced in a solar system that you'd be wasting most of the energy increase (inverse square law and all that).

On a larger scale, I guess it's possible that your targets have completely artificial facilities orbiting stars, rather than orbiting planet. Even if this is the case, then we could increase the energy yields here many orders of magnitude and destroy a solar system with a single weapon. But this just scales up what I said earlier.. to demonstrate destructive capability, you'd want to trigger your appropriately-sized star-killing bombs on multiple solar systems, rather than trying to destroy multiple solar systems with a bigger bomb.
Increasing the sheer yield of a weapon in an attempt to destroy multiple solar systems is silly, because the relative vast empty space between stars means that almost all your yield increase is actually wasted.
Even worse, a raw increase in energy without any exotic technomagic dickery means that not only do you have the inverse square law to deal with, lightspeed propagation of destructive effects makes the weapon laughably slow at affecting any solar system beyond the initial target.


If anything, I'd say that hypothetical superbeings that are capable of creating a small number of incredibly high energy events (like the mattter-antimatter annihilation of stellar masses mentioned), would be far less of a threat than something that can arbitrarily accurately and unstoppably induce the equivalent of just a few kilograms of matter-antimatter annihilation anywhere they please (FTL capable), in larger numbers.

[chasrob]

That’s an interesting take. Reminds me of the change in America’s nuke doctrine in the early 1960s… the changeover from multi-megaton nukes to MIRVs, with their smaller yield, independently targeted vehicles.

[Grumman]

Cyke and I agree for the most part, but I will point out one mitigating feature of a star-killer: you don't need to do all the work yourself. When everything is already in the sphere of influence of a massive fusion reactor, all you need to do is break the reactor by some technobabble means - you don't need a bomb that can blow up a solar system all by itself.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Cyke and I agree for the most part, but I will point out one mitigating feature of a star-killer: you don't need to do all the work yourself. When everything is already in the sphere of influence of a massive fusion reactor, all you need to do is break the reactor by some technobabble means - you don't need a bomb that can blow up a solar system all by itself.

Yeah, but, even when looking at SF superweapons star-killing weapons are hard, since stars are actually kinda difficult to destroy. The only method I can recall from an SF work that makes even some sense is the Nova Bombs from Andromeda that cancel out the star's gravity temporarily.

Hell, there we go, you want a magic-tech weapon that relies on godlike powers? Have them use bombs that cancel the Strong Force, that way all the protons will go flying apart with insane force (relative to their size).

[Terralthra]

Well, any 'verse with the ability to place teleporter loci arbitrarily can kill a star by poisoning the core with sufficient heavy metals or by moving enough material out of it. Stargate did both versions of this, in Red Sky and Exodus, respectively. This works for Stargate because the gates themselves appear to be nearly indestructible...until they're about to dangerously explode...

I suppose a sufficient mass of Element Zero from Mass Effect could have a deleterious effect on a stellar core if it could get there intact.

[Eternal_Freedom]

The trouble with supernova weapons is that they are rather wasteful. True, a single solar system's worth of resources is peanuts to a true galactic civilisation, but destroying an entire star system because there are a bunch of facilities there that you don't like seems unnecessary.

[NoXion]

Not if the sheer overkill involved is part of the message one is trying to send. Smashing up an entire solar system is a pretty effective response to the destruction of a planet, it says "we can hit you back that much harder, and are able and willing to blow up stars to do it".

[Eternal_Freedom]

True. I suppose I'm thinking in similar terms to nukes, where the trend moved from one large bomb to several smaller, more accurate ones.

Yes, blasting a solar system to rubble is an effective message. But still, it does sound like a weapon used for political purposes rather than any genuine military use.

[Simon_Jester]

Then again, if you manage to annihilate everything, uniformly and without exception, does it really matter how much energy you used to make that happen?

Suppose that you wish to "send a message" about how you will deal with offending planets, and your choices are:

1) Blow up the entire planet, reducing it to a debris field.
2) Initiate an explosion with the force of fifty grams of TNT within the brainpan of every being on that planet.

(2) may very well send 'the message' just as effectively as (1) if not more so, because it indicates that not only do you have vast forces at your disposal, but you also have a nigh-omniscient ability to locate every offending being and destroy them, without doing anything but locate and destroy the offending beings.

Plus, the "HOW THE HELL DID THEY DO THAT" aspect may be if anything more impressive.