Friday, November 10, 2017

[nvcwxhyc] Black hole refrigerator

Enclose a large black hole with a spherical shell radiator with the radiator fins pointed toward the hole.  Pull heat from a refrigerated compartment outside the shell and dump the heat via the radiator into the black hole.  This system of the refrigerated compartment and black hole seems weird, seemingly violating some law of thermodynamics: The refrigerated compartment can keep getting colder and colder but no where else seems to be correspondingly getting hotter.  (I suppose the resolution is the Hawking radiation that the black hole ultimately emits.)

Practically, this won't work so well: an occasional atom falling off the radiator will radiate a significant portion of its mass energy in an accretion disc around the black hole.

Is there any situation which dumping waste heat into a black hole is better than radiating it out into space?

Maybe there are huge extraterrestrial civilizations out there, completely tapping the energy output of stars (Dyson spheres) or galaxies (Kardashev type 3), but they are hiding their heat output from us by dumping their waste heat into black holes.

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