Warp Factor 11 - ships powered by BLACK HOLES to “outpace Enterprise”, say scientists

When Star Trek’s Scotty warns the Captain that the engines can’t “take it”, he might just be best off switching fuel - a new book claims that humanity could reach the stars using vast spacecraft harnessing the energy of black holes with the power to “eat planets”.

Inside would be an artificial black hole - created by spheres of generators firing “gravitons”- and, claims author Dr Roger Hoskins, Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, would curve space-time - and would be “faster than anti matter drives.”

Captain Kirk would be jealous of the speeds offered by a black hole powered craft - which displaces or curves space time, like a warp drive, thus appearing to go faster than light.  

Dr Hoskins based his novel on the latest research papers into cold dark matter, and scientific papers on gravity, dark matter and the origin of black holes. He says that the technology would carry “dangers” - which is what sci fi novel Supernova 2074 strives to point out. Hoskins thinks that the technology is one humanity will work towards - but wants to  “warn of the dangers.”

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“We probably would survive this technology,” he says - but if such a ship malfunctioned, it could “devour Earth from within” before even setting off.

The Enterprise faces the occasional mishap, such as a detour to find dilithium crystals - but creating a black hole within the confines of a manned spacecraft would involve such enormous dangers as to make Klingons seem like fraggles.

The vast gravity would be created by an arrray of guns firing particles at a growing black hole.

Physicists have researched the idea for decades - with the theoretical technology having the unforgettable name of Schwarzschild Kugelblitzes.

Earlier estimates required a mass of around two Empire State Buildings and a power output millions of times that of a modern Earthly city.

"Gravitons” are theoretical particles which also power the Enterprise’s warp drive. To make such a drive work, Dr Hoskins says, you would need an array of guns firing gravitons, and at least three containment shields to prevent the black hole devouring everything around it due to its imense gravity.

Hoskins says the first steps towards the technology have already been taken, and are widely known “Making a black hole is extremely difficult, but it would not be as dangerous or hard to handle as a massive quantity of antimatter. Although the process of generating a black hole is extremely massive, it does not require any new physics.”

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Current plans for long-distance spacecraft rely on generations volunteering to live and die on spacecraft - without the ability to displace space-time, the journey would take hundreds of years.

“We don’t need warp drive or wormholes to reach the stars – we just need to use the known laws of physics and think big,” says Les Johnson of NASA’s Advanced Concepts Office.

“There are ways, in known physics, that will enable us to go from here to there, but in order to do that, we have to think differently. We have to start thinking big. And I mean really big.”

Johnson’s suggestions included a “solar sail” the size of a country, and “cities in space” - delivered in a speech at the Interstellar Conference in Las Vegas.

Black holes might be risky - but they would displace (or ‘curve’) space-time to enable faster-than-light travel. For humanity to reach the stars, some new technology may be an essential - even if we had a spacecraft capable of 10% of the speed of light (currently impossible), it would still take 44 years to reach the nearest star.

“Black holes warp space time due to graviton production, much the same as how warp drive technology works.

Black holes are highly dense matter with a very high graviton output. Gravitons act by displacing (curving) space-time. In theory it would not only be faster than an anti-matter drive - and also because you are actually displacing the substance of spacetime you would probabaly be capable of "appearing" to go faster than light.”

Dr Hoskins says that building one would require all of humanity to cooperate - which already puts us in the realm of science fiction.

He says, “The dangers of black hole technology is precisely what the book aspires to point out. But this technology would take an immensely cooperative effort on the part of human kind.”

One thing of which the author is sure is that space is worth exploring - as there is almost certainly company out there. “If there is sentience in our tiny little part of the galaxy - there is likely to be sentience elsewhere. There are 100 billion solar sytems in our galaxy and after all there are some 300 biilion galaxies in our observable Universe alone.”

“Supernova 2134” by Roger Hoskins is out now.