Adam Brown

And you want to get that, and nuclear processes conserve that.

beta decay will maybe turn a proton into a neutron or vice versa, but the total number of protons plus neutrons is not changing, and so therefore 99.9% of the energy is inaccessible to you.

So what you need to do to get that energy and try and get most of the MC squared out of the matter that you have, what you need to do is use a process that eats

barrier number that can in which you can start off with a proton and a neutron and end up with no proton or neutron and instead all of that energy unleashed in high energy radiation that you can use for your purposes so electromagnetic interactions won't do that strong interactions also won't do that weak interactions won't do that the only

force of nature that will do that, with a small caveat.

The only force of nature that we know that will do that is the gravitational interaction.

And so it is a property of black holes that you can stand outside the black hole and throw protons and neutrons into the black holes, and then it'll process it and then spit out photons at the end in Hawking radiation, and gravitons, which is

going to be slightly annoying to have to uh capture and and neutrinos but like they're there in principle and in principle you could capture them so one thing that black holes might be technologically useful for in the future is you start off with a much smaller black hole than uh than what i've just done uh the size of the sun be very careful about making sure it doesn't grow and yeah you can be super duper careful um and throw in protons and neutrons uh and then get out photons and

In principle, if you could capture everything that's emitted from the black hole, including the gravitons in the neutrinos, that gets rid of the barrier number conservation problem and allows you to build power plants that approach 100% efficiency.

And by 100%, I mean not the way we measure gas turbine efficiency, where we talk about the total available chemical energy in the gas.

I mean 100% of the mc2 of the entire gas you're putting in.

We have a lot of mass.

On the other hand, you know, we also have plans for our future that involves exponential growth.

And eventually we will run low on that mass and, you know, not that many doublings before using up the whole galaxy.

So you want to use it carefully.

Ah, okay.

Well, as much information... That's a great question.

That has been a very productive line of thought.

And the answer to that question goes back to Hawking and Penrose.

So you could even ask another question, which is how much information can anything store?