Black Holes -- WHAAAA? - Nico Repinski

Black holes are the strangest thing in the universe. There’s so much that we don’t understand about them, but from what we can unravel has changed our understanding on physics forever. But the weirdest thing in the universe has a chance to get weirder because of one simple reason. Some black holes spin. When a star collapses into a black hole. This means that something very big, crushes down into something very small. And sometimes stars are spinning, and a fundementle law of our reality is that things that are spinning, don’t want to stop spinning. But when something is spinning and then becomes smaller, it spins way faster than before. Think about an ice skater, when they pull they’re arms and legs in towards themselves they begin to pick up angular momentum. Same concept here. The spinning star collapses into something very small (a black hole) but this black hole keeps spinning. This force is so powerful that a spinning black hole litterally drags space time around with it, so be it’s power. This creates a new and super weird region of space time called the ergosphere. The ergosphere is the area that surrounds a spinning black hole. It’s possible to enter and then leave the ergosphere, but it’s probably not a great experience. It’s sort of like the halfway point of a black hole. While time is completely broken in a black hole, time is only half broken in the ergosphere. Think of it like a whirlpool, with the center of the whirlpool being the black hole. The ergosphere will begin to push anything that enters it in a circle. Which is hard to get out of. But it’s possible to actually cheat the system, and steal this rotational energy. Think about it like this, if you were to swim with the current of a whirlpool, it would actually push you in the right direction, so how do we harness this energy? Well the first step is (to oversimplify) to place a giant mirror around the ergosphere, encapsulating it. Then all we would really need to do, is open op a window in the mirror, and shoot electromagnetic waves at it. The waves would bounce off the mirror, and be pushed along by the ergospheres rotational energy. They would now begin super-radiant scattering. Which is a fancy science term meaning go faster and faster each time it goes around. A small portion of the waves would fall past the even horizon of the black hole, and be eaten up, gone forever. But a much larger portion would keep moving faster and faster. Duplicating itself. We could then harness the energy of the electro magnetic waves to (in theory) power civilizations for millenia. Being the only true infinite source of energy. But this is a hefty baragin. Because if we do not do it properly, it would be the biggest bomb any human could hope to create. Because if we do not harness the energy fast enough, the electro magnetic waves would keep duplicating and duplicating and moving faster and faster. Until the mirro shatters, releasing all of the energy at once. This would release as much energy as a supernova. In other words, it would be the biggest bomb ever made.