It still doesn’t seem to make sense. Buiding a black hole anywhere near a sentient agent seems like a really, really bad idea. Orbiting around one doesn’t help you drop things into it much—because of orbital inertia. The suggestion seems rather like proposing that we dump the planet’s excess heat into the Sun—as opposed to radiating it off in all directions. Yes, we could build a heat ray and point it at the sun—but if you think about that for a moment, you will realise why it wouldn’t help get rid of entropy, and would actually just make things worse.
The tiny relative temperature difference between the surface of the hole and interstellar space hardly makes much difference if you are many millions of miles away from it. Also, the hole is likely to be surrounded by extremely hot stuff in orbit around it. Are you sure that you have thought this idea through?
By the time your civilisation is taking advantage of black holes, it’s large enough that even a small temperature difference can scale to quite a bit of negentropy. Further, you don’t have to be in orbit, you can build a Dyson shell around the hole at such a distance that the surface gravity is one g. (Or several shells, if people prefer different levels of gravity.) Then there’s no orbital velocity to deal with. (And in any case, you could brake by tidal friction and extract some entropy that way.) Or to be shorter, why are you objecting to the practical details of a thought experiment? Nothing about the game theory relies on black holes or the particular exponent 2; it could just as well be mass^1.5, and the analysis would remain the same although the numbers would change a bit.
How is a Dyson sphere anything other than “in orbit”? Do you not know how they are supposed to work? Incidentally, Dyson spheres are a pretty silly idea as well. Slightly more realistic are rings—e.g. see my http://timtyler.org/the_rings_of_earth/
There are multiple types of Dyson sphere. Dyson’s original vision, a swarm of satellites, would be in orbit, but the popular version more commonly seen in fiction—a solid shell—would not, any more than the Earth orbits its own core (although any one point on the shell could plausibly be said to orbit the centre, provided the sphere is spinning).
A solid Dyson sphere is a dumb idea, the dynamics are unstable. See Niven’s essay on the dynamics of ringworld for the problems, and realize a sphere would be even worse. I don’t remember whether he discussed that in “Bigger than Worlds” or in an essay specifically on building Ringworld, he did discuss the dynamics problems in the novels as well.
It still doesn’t seem to make sense. Buiding a black hole anywhere near a sentient agent seems like a really, really bad idea. Orbiting around one doesn’t help you drop things into it much—because of orbital inertia. The suggestion seems rather like proposing that we dump the planet’s excess heat into the Sun—as opposed to radiating it off in all directions. Yes, we could build a heat ray and point it at the sun—but if you think about that for a moment, you will realise why it wouldn’t help get rid of entropy, and would actually just make things worse.
The tiny relative temperature difference between the surface of the hole and interstellar space hardly makes much difference if you are many millions of miles away from it. Also, the hole is likely to be surrounded by extremely hot stuff in orbit around it. Are you sure that you have thought this idea through?
By the time your civilisation is taking advantage of black holes, it’s large enough that even a small temperature difference can scale to quite a bit of negentropy. Further, you don’t have to be in orbit, you can build a Dyson shell around the hole at such a distance that the surface gravity is one g. (Or several shells, if people prefer different levels of gravity.) Then there’s no orbital velocity to deal with. (And in any case, you could brake by tidal friction and extract some entropy that way.) Or to be shorter, why are you objecting to the practical details of a thought experiment? Nothing about the game theory relies on black holes or the particular exponent 2; it could just as well be mass^1.5, and the analysis would remain the same although the numbers would change a bit.
How is a Dyson sphere anything other than “in orbit”? Do you not know how they are supposed to work? Incidentally, Dyson spheres are a pretty silly idea as well. Slightly more realistic are rings—e.g. see my http://timtyler.org/the_rings_of_earth/
There are multiple types of Dyson sphere. Dyson’s original vision, a swarm of satellites, would be in orbit, but the popular version more commonly seen in fiction—a solid shell—would not, any more than the Earth orbits its own core (although any one point on the shell could plausibly be said to orbit the centre, provided the sphere is spinning).
A solid Dyson sphere is a dumb idea, the dynamics are unstable. See Niven’s essay on the dynamics of ringworld for the problems, and realize a sphere would be even worse. I don’t remember whether he discussed that in “Bigger than Worlds” or in an essay specifically on building Ringworld, he did discuss the dynamics problems in the novels as well.
So you have to expend a bit of energy moving it back to the midpoint every so often. What are attitude jets for?
In fantasy novels, you mean?