Once upon a time, we took a look at why creating black holes in particle colliders and using them to generate energy for our power grids was fraught with problems. However, if at sometime in the future we could scale up our lasers and use them to create a black hole with a mass energy equivalent of a million tons, relativistic rocketry would be within our reach. Artificial black holes that small would evaporate away in about a century or so while radiating so much energy, they could power a spacecraft to near light speed in just a decades. Or at least that’s the big idea advanced in a paper by Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland, mathematicians with a passion for theoretical physics and inspired by science fiction novels which sought to provide exotic power sources for highly advanced alien civilizations crisscrossing the cosmos in giant spacecraft at their leisure.

Interesting ...