Generating power using a black hole's accretion disk?

Could you power a starship by feeding matter into a black hole and collecting the plasma produced by the tidal forces ripping apart whatever you fed it, or is this impossible/impractical? I keep reading about how black hole starships can harvest the energy produced by the black hole's Hawking radiation to propel the ship, but this honestly doesn't seem that outstanding relative to the amount of effort you'd need to expend creating the damn black hole, especially when the sweet spot seems to be a power output of a few petawatts for only 3-5 years. That's an astounding amount of power don't get me wrong, but it won't be enough for truly large spacecraft to reach significant fractions of c. On top of that it only lasts a few years before you need to make a new one, and it bleeds less energy than you'd have to put into making it.

So could you create an indefinitely sustainable black hole engine by feeding matter into the accretion disk and harnessing the resulting plasma, or must we settle for inefficiently sucking up the black hole's Hawking radiation?

posted about 8 years ago

Z.Schroeder‭

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