{"id":178946,"date":"2023-12-23T15:24:21","date_gmt":"2023-12-23T21:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/kugelblitz-powering-a-starship-with-a-black-hole"},"modified":"2023-12-23T15:24:21","modified_gmt":"2023-12-23T21:24:21","slug":"kugelblitz-powering-a-starship-with-a-black-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/kugelblitz-powering-a-starship-with-a-black-hole","title":{"rendered":"Kugelblitz! Powering a Starship With a Black Hole"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/kugelblitz-powering-a-starship-with-a-black-hole.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>To construct a Dyson Shell (or Cap), an exceptionally light and very absorptive material would be necessary, because a 20-mile-radius (32 km), 0.4-inch-thick (1 cm) titanium Dyson Shell would have a mass of more than 1,200 Empire State buildings! Alternatively, a Dyson Cap that absorbs radiation that would be fed into a heat engine would have a lower mass, but would also deliver an inferior acceleration.<\/p>\n<p>Furthermore, a gamma-ray laser is currently the only conceivable technology that could be used to make a Schwarzschild Kugelblitz. However, such a laser\u2019s output frequency would need to exceed current technology by more than a billion times. Its pulse duration would have to be a hundred billion times shorter than that of lasers today. The total energy of a single laser pulse would need to be equivalent to the energy the sun puts out in 1\/10 of a second.<\/p>\n<p>While it\u2019s true that the technical challenges render it unlikely that a SK will be fueling an interstellar starship anytime soon, it\u2019s imperative that we embrace a wide range of theoretical research. SKs can produce many petawatts of useable radiation; therefore, they hold the potential to be an ideal source of power for interstellar starships. Thus, in time, Schwarzschild Kugelblitzes may merit a position of distinction on the vast technology arc that could one day take us to the stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To construct a Dyson Shell (or Cap), an exceptionally light and very absorptive material would be necessary, because a 20-mile-radius (32 km), 0.4-inch-thick (1 cm) titanium Dyson Shell would have a mass of more than 1,200 Empire State buildings! Alternatively, a Dyson Cap that absorbs radiation that would be fed into a heat engine would [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178946\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}