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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 15d

Oh, yeah!

Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 15d

I had made a mistake in a holiday request and only noticed now. Thanks to our flexible administration experience and energy for fighting SAP systems, I was able to get it back! Phew!

Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 15d

Imagine my surprise when I saw I took 52 holidays last year. So I have -20 holidays left this year!

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 17d

"Let's fix it and not tell anyone nor apologize." same intern one week later, presumably

Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 24d

Why did they call the lamp post x-ray corona and not an "isco ball"?

Black hole with two disco balls attached.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 24d

Gute Besserung!

Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

Well, that's not the can-do energy I was hoping for.

Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

(end of ChatGPT)

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

Bottom line: There is no viable method, now or in any foreseeable future, to create or safely manage a small BH near Earth or Moon that lasts >1h. The required energies & focusing are far beyond our capabilities, and the radiation and control issues would make it extraordinarily dangerous.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

4. Somehow perform this far from Earth to avoid catastrophic radiation exposure.
5. Accept that no known or foreseen technology can implement any of these bullet points, and that even a “success” would create an uncontrollable, intensely radiating object.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

1. Choose a target mass (>10^6 kg for >1 hour).
2. Accumulate the required energy (∼10^23 J) & generate a spherically symmetric pulse of ≳100TeV photons.
3. Focus the pulse to within ≲r_s (~10^-21 m) with ns timing & near-perfect symmetry to avoid bouncing instead of collapsing.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

If one insisted on a conceptual “roadmap,” the only physically consistent outline is entirely speculative and blocked at every step:

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

Emission includes gamma rays, electrons/positrons, hadrons, and neutrinos; shielding TeV-scale emission is not practical on planetary scales.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

At lunar distance: Flux at Earth drops to a few W/m^2 for an hour-lifetime object (still energetic gamma/hadron showers), but the local lunar environment would be violently ablated and irradiated. Heavier, longer-lived holes radiate less power but are even more impossible to create.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

- Radiation hazard:
Near Earth orbit: A ~10^19 W isotropic TeV spectrum would deliver global average fluxes of order 10^4 W/m^2 at Earth if placed in low Earth orbit—catastrophic ionizing radiation and atmospheric chemistry impacts.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

- Accretion & “feeding”: The effective capture cross-section for matter is incredibly small (for M~10^6 kg, σ~10^-39 m^2 for relativistic particles). “Feeding” it to control T is ~impossible; directing dense beams close enough is beyond engineering & any apparatus would be destroyed by the radiation

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

- Orbital stability: The object’s mass changes rapidly (for hour-scale lifetimes), and Hawking emission is stochastic and highly energetic. Even tiny anisotropies in emission impart significant kicks. There is no practical station-keeping method.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

- You cannot confine it: Neutral black holes do not respond to electromagnetic fields. Charging one would be self-neutralizing by attracting opposite charges. No material container can survive the radiation flux or provide mechanical confinement.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

Control and placement challenges (if one somehow existed)

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

- Capture difficulty: Even if one existed, capturing it into orbit would require dissipating enormous orbital energy wo. any handle to “grab” it. Its geometric capture cross section is minuscule (σ~tens of r_s^2), so you cannot slow it with matter. There is no realistic way to net or tow it.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

- Abundance constraints: Observations strongly limit the number of primordial black holes across almost all masses. An object in the ~10^6 kg range would have evaporated long ago; surviving primordial BH must be much heavier (≳10^11–10^12 kg) and are already tightly constrained to be extremely rare.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

Why capturing a natural (primordial) black hole doesn’t help

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

4. “Gamma-ray laser” concepts are purely speculative: Proposals by focusing an immense gamma-ray pulse (Louis Crane) require non-existing technologies & rely on idealized assumptions about perfect sphericity, coherence & mirrors for ultra–high-energy gamma rays that physics says we cannot build.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

3. Compressing matter won’t do it: No known material or equation-of-state can be engineered to compress multi-megaton masses into a volume smaller than 10^-60 m^3. The repulsive forces, heating, and quantum effects preclude this; you either explode or form a larger object that is far from collapse.

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Johannes Buchner @johannesbuchner.bsky.social · 28d

2. Colliders are nowhere near the scale needed: Even the most powerful colliders reach ~10^4 GeV per particle (TeV scale). An 1h lifetime BH would have mass-energy ~ 10^33 GeV. There is no path from “many collisions” to a single macroscopic BH bc you cannot trap & concentrate energy at 10^-21 m.

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