David Kipping

And again, you're just seeing energy from the black hole to do this.

So you can get up to the same speed.

It's basically the same idea as Freeman Dyson, but doing it from a safer distance.

And there should be of order of a million or so or 10 million black holes in the Milky Way galaxy.

Some of them would be even as close as 10 to 20 light years when you do the occurrence rate statistics of how close you might feasibly want to be.

They're of course difficult to detect because they're black, and so they're inherently hard to see.

But statistically, there should be plenty out there in the Milky Way.

And so these objects would be natural waypoint stations.

You could use them to both accelerate away and to brake and slow down.

Yeah.

I mean, it may be that black holes are used in all sorts of ways, um, by advanced civilizations.

I think, uh, again, it's been a popular idea in science fiction or science fiction trope that Sagittarius A star, the supermassive black hole in a central black galaxy could be the best place to look for intelligent life in the universe because it is a giant, uh,

engine in a way.

A unique capability of a black hole is you can basically throw matter into it and you can get these jets that come out, the accretion disks and the jets that fly out.

And so you can more or less use them to convert matter into energy V equals MC squared.

And there's pretty much nothing else except for annihilation with its own antiparticle as a way of doing that.

So they have some unique properties.

You could perhaps power a civilization by just throwing garbage into a black hole, right?

Just throwing asteroids in and power your civilization with as much energy as you really would ever plausibly need.

And you could also use them to accelerate away across the universe.