E=MC², the most famous equation in the world describes the fact that anything with mass possesses a huge amount of energy in principle like a 5-kilogram cat has enough energy in its mass to power the entire country of Norway for a year. If only the energy could somehow be fully extracted from the cat, but it turns out that efficiently extracting energy from Mass is a very hard thing to do antimatter is the most efficient way of extracting energy from Mass since if you Light a cat with a cat made of antimatter a hundred per cent of the mass of the cat and anti-cat will be converted into energy powering Norway for two years, but the universe has almost no naturally occurring antimatter. So it’s not a practical choice for generating energy. Since you’d first have to use a lot of energy to make a large mass of antimatter since we can’t use antimatter. There are basically three options left to US Chemical Reactions nuclear reactions and gravitational reactions like matter falling into black holes to start chemical. Jeans are so bad at extracting energy from Mass that we don’t even think about what they’re doing as converting Mass to energy, even though it is as an illustration reacting a balloon of hydrogen and oxygen gases creates a nice big explosion, but the end products of the reaction only weigh half a nanogram less than the initial reactants which amount to a measly point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one per cent efficiency of converting Mass into energy at that rate. You’d need to 10 billion cats to power know.
Wait for a year nuclear reactions are a lot more efficient, but still pretty mediocre on an absolute scale splitting uranium-235 into Krypton and barium converts only about point zero eight per cent of the uranium’s mass into energy and fusing hydrogen into helium, like in the sun converts about point seven per cent of the hydrogen’s mass into energy at that rate. You’d need a hundred and fifty cats to power Norway for a year. This is where black holes come in. They’re about as good as it gets in our universe for extracting energy. From Mass which may sound weird because as you’ve probably heard nothing can escape black holes once inside but the efficiency of black holes comes from what stuff does while Falling Towards them before passing the no turning back point of the Event Horizon anything that falls in a gravitational field speeds up gaining kinetic energy and if it then crashes into something, it can convert that kinetic energy into heat that heat can then radiate away as infrared radiation slightly decreasing the mass of the object.
Planets and stars this conversion of mass into energy is pretty pathetic an object falling to the surface of the Earth releases only about one-billionth of its mass as energy. That’s basically as bad as a chemical reaction and explains why we don’t think of falling to the ground as a way of converting Mass into energy. It’s a really bad way but black holes have something special going for them. They are stupendously small a black hole with the mass of the Earth would be about two centimetres across providing way farther for an object to fall and since gravity gets stronger and stronger the closer you are to an object objects falling into black holes get accelerated to ridiculous speeds specifically an object falling all the way to the event horizon of a black hole will have kinetic energy equivalent to roughly half of its E equals MC squared mass-energy. However, if the object continues to fall into the black hole, all of that energy will be stuck inside the black hole the way to actually convert mass into energy that goes out into the universe is to have the object slowly spiral into the black hole crashing into other stuff on
Way heating up radiating that energy away. Thereby losing mass and speed slowing down more spiralling to a yet lower orbit. And so on all the way down to the innermost possible orbits, and this is exactly what accretion disks around black holes do so how good are they at converting Mass to energy well for a non-rotating black hole the innermost possible circular orbit is actually three times farther out than the Event Horizon. And in order to spiral into that point and object has to convert around six per cent of its mass into energy radiated away to the outside University. Worse after that point, if it loses any more energy, it will plunge down into the black hole and no more energy can be extracted. But at this six per cent Mass to energy conversion rate, you’d only need to throw 17 cats into a black hole to power Norway for a year compared to the point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one per cent efficiency of chemical reactions and the point 1 to point seven per cent efficiency of nuclear reactions 6% for a non-rotating black hole may seem pretty good but rotating black holes are Bend space-time they literally dragged the things orbiting them along with them in the direction of their rotation, which means the innermost possible orbit can be much closer to the black hole the details depend on how fast the black hole is rotating, but for a very quickly rotating black hole the innermost possible orbit coincides with the Event Horizon instead of being three times farther away. And the Event Horizon itself is half as big as for a non-rotating black hole combined together. This means that matter falling into rotating black holes can convert as much as forty-two per cent of its mass into energy or equivalently you’d only need two and a half in spiralling cats to power Norway for a year. So if you really want to take advantage of equals mc squared and convert the mass of an object into energy don’t bother with chemical reactions or nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. Just throw it into a black hole.
Globe Eld 