Adam Brown

somewhat counterproductive but like just just outside the horizon just grab some of that hawking radiation and just drag it a long way away from the black hole and then and then feast on it or do whatever it is you want to do with it and in that way you could what's called mine a black hole you could speed up the evaporation of a black hole by a huge factor so in fact that the lifetime would no longer go like the mass cubed like it does with just unaided hawking radiation but would scale like just a mass so considerably faster uh for a

large black hole.

So this was these proposals, and what I had a somewhat sort of pessimistic contribution to the story, which is that the existing proposals did not work.

They didn't work to speed it up, and in fact, you can't speed it up, you can't get down that m cubed down to m. You can't in fact get anything less than m cubed.

It still scales like the mass cubed.

The length of time you need to wait to get all the energy out of a black hole still scales like the mass cubed.

And

What goes wrong is ultimately a material science problem.

So this scoop that comes down really close to the horizon.

Now, from one point of view, that's just like a space elevator, albeit a very high performance space elevator.

Space elevators, you'll remember, are these ideas for how we might get things off the surface of the Earth without using rockets.

And the idea is that you have some massive orbiting object, sort of very long way away beyond geostationary orbit, and then you dangle off that rope down to the surface of the Earth, and then you can essentially just climb up the rope.

to get out.

That's the space elevator idea.

And already around Earth, it's hitting pretty hard material science constraints.

So if you want to make a space elevator, the trouble with making a space elevator isn't so much supporting the payload that you're trying to have climb up.

It is merely just the rope supporting its own weight.

Because each bit of the rope needs to support not only its own weight, but also the weight of all of the rope beneath it.

So the tension that you require keeps getting more and more and more as you go up.

At the bottom, there is no tension effect.