Friday, August 24, 2018

[hbubqbqi] Problems with the black hole at the center of the Earth

Having mined out the core of the earth for its metals, perhaps to build lots of space stations or space ships, we imagine replacing the core with an artificial black hole of appropriate mass in order to maintain comfortable normal gravity at the surface.  The weight of the rest of the earth is supported by an enormous spherical dome made of out some superstrong material.  Either the Earth or the black hole is regularly moved as station-keeping to keep the black hole at the center of the planet / dome, because the arrangement is not gravitationally stable (akin to a solid Dyson sphere around a star, or a ringworld).

A lot of things could go wrong at any moment (dome failure, station-keeping failure) resulting in the catastrophic destruction of the planet.  Therefore, we imagine the planet's population regularly practices complete planetary evacuation.  Joining the many fanciful technologies already imagined above, we also imagine some technology in which planetary evacuation is trivial, as trivial as a building evacuation or fire drill is today.

Can you do it without teleporters?

Inspired by Isaac Arthur, who didn't quite go far enough into speculating technologies making planetary evacuation so easy it could be done as a once-a-month drill.  We would probably also want to practice taking our Pyramids and wildlife sanctuaries with us each month then putting them back.

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