How to get rid of a Black Hole.

[OldNewNewOld]

How about creating a bomb that when detonated will lower the temperature of an area to the absolute zero (0K ; -273.15°C). AFAIK nothing can move at that temperature.

There you have it. You would just have to occasionally shoot the same bomb in the area (tho that is impossible since the bomb would freeze as soon as it enters the area. But people don't need to know that.

 

[PurePareidolia]

A black hole is a misnomer - it's just a tiny, very dense mass, it can still have forces applied to it. So depending on how far away it is, you just push it away. If you have a tonne of distance, you can use a laser to slightly nudge it away from the planet over time, or you can attempt to hit it away by accelerating a mass at it to ridiculously fast speeds and aiming slightly to the side so then it collides on a diagonal, pushing it away from you/slowing it down. You do want to go for speed more than mass because adding to the thing's mass is probably not a great move and you get exponentially more force out of increasing speed (Ek=1/2m*v^2). The big problem is you're trying to hit something with the mass of a supernova away and you're going to have to REALLY work at it.

A bomb wouldn't work because it's a collapsed supernova - you aren't going to get a bomb more powerful than a gigantic stellar fusion reactor - there literally isn't enough mass on earth to do it.

That's not to say you can't still go that route, just throw in some technobabble about it being a dark energy charge which temporarily neutralizes the local Higgs field, counteracting the gravitational forces of the singularity and creating rapid expansion followed by dissipation.
Basically you nullify it's gravity causing it to explode outwards until a significant amount of its mass is beyond its event horizon, then when the field fizzles out there won't be enough left to turn back into a black hole. You could even use follow up bombs to tear it further apart.

You want to have a LOT of distance between you and it for this to not simply incinerate everyone in the nearby vicinity.

 

[Sneezeguard]

Create another blackhole in its way.

 

[GundamSentinel]

This is not as viable as it sounds. To get an observeable effect on the direction of a travelling black hole you would need a mass that is equal to or greater than the mass of the black hole.

Black holes are considered to have an infinite mass so gathering a mass equal to or greater than a black hole would at the very least result in a new star bieng born.

Then you must remember that the stresses created by a black holes gravatational field often rip apart any object from quite a long way away. So any mass you put near it may end up just forming a fancy new accretion disc.

Nope, black holes do not have infinite mass. They have the mass of the star they originated from plus any matter they may have gobbled up. That makes them heavy, but nowhere near infinite. Hell, they don't even have infinite density as many people seem to believe (in fact, the bigger the black hole is, the smaller the density. The giant black holes at the center of galaxies have a density that approaches the density of air (and yes, they are still black holes)). And of course there are the quantum singularities (the ones the LHC would supposedly create), which are positively tiny and have about the same gravity as a tennis ball, but are black holes nonetheless.

It's true that the greater the mass of the planet is (or the smaller the distance to the black hole), the greater the effect will be on its orbit, but even a very small mass will have some effect on the trajectory of a black hole. And remember, space is pretty big and pretty empty. Even a change in trajectory of a fraction of a degree might be enough for it to sail by, especially if you manage to do it right at the edge of the solar system.

Yes, the gravity of a black hole rips things apart that get to close to it, and yeah, Jupiter might be sacrificed for the greater good. But even for a black hole, the distance at which a planet like Jupiter is ripped apart is quite small (maybe a couple million kilometers for a black hole with 10 solar masses. The bigger the black hole is, the lower the density and the closer you can get to the event horizon before being ripped apart. But then again, the less influence the mass of Jupiter would have on the trajectory of the black hole.

Still, a large black hole in the solar system would wreak havoc on the orbits of every planet or moon (and the Sun itself), and there would be only a small chance that something would be actually sucked inside it. For the hell of it, I made a simulation of it in Universe Sandbox. Planets were flying all over the place and Earth was shot into interstellar space, so I suppose that keeping the Earth where it is would be the biggest problem.

Big black hole enters the solar system; everybody will die.

 

[Sunrider]

Big deal. I've stopped plenty of Black Holes. Just pick a hero with a reliable stun.
If Enigma buys a BKB, however, I hope you picked Vengeful Spirit or Beastmaster.
Shutting Enigma down early to prevent the Blink + BKB is the best way to go!

 

[Porygon-2000]

Blow it up. Has no-one seen the Time Crash episode of Doctor Who? All you need is a TARDIS-sized explosion to counter a black-hole sized implosion, and you're set!

 

[Gone Rampant]

Why try to stop the black hole? Just move the solar system out of its way. Much easier.

Seriously, this thread is silly. It's like standing on train tracks and asking about the best way to stop the train.

Simple: Blow it up. Works for the train too- if they did that in Unstoppable, it would've been a real short movie.

 

[Treblaine]

My current idea is a bomb so powerful that (with a touch of space-magic) it counteracts the gravitational force of the Black Hole and basically fizzles it out. But I then thought that such a bomb would have to infinitely powerful, and an infinitely powerful explosion would just blow up the universe.

WHAT!!!!?!? That's more woefully incorrect techno-babble than I can stand. It's like Troll-physics.

For one, a Black Hole cannot "fizzle out" things are drawn in by gravity. There is nothing active pulling things in.

Anything that gets NEAR the black hole would be first torn apart and then frozen in time on the even horizon... FOREVER.

Nothing can escape a black hole... NOTHING! Not even light, not even X-rays. The more you put into a black hole (either energy or mass, it doesn't matter) the more "massive" it gets, even setting off a bomb or throwing Jupiter at it it will just get more "massive" (yet still smaller than the smallest thing ever) and so stronger gravitational force. Mass is how much, mass, it has, but the gravity crushes everything down into a singularity.

The only way you could deal with a black hole is to somehow contain it and evaporate it with Hawking radiation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#Black_hole_evaporation

It might be possible to accelerate this process, possibly with the mysterious and as yet undiscovered properties of Dark Matter or Dark Energy.

Remember, most Energy in the universe is Dark Energy, most matter is Dark Matter and we know NOTHING about them except that they are screwing with the results of our study of the universe. There seems to be no dark matter on Earth or even our solar system, while dark energy may be impossible for us to detect with equipment made of matter.

 

[juraigamer]

There's only two ways:

Create your own black hole in it's path and the effects will end up causing the black holes to collapse on each other or make a larger black hole, which will give the solar system time to move out of the way

Or

Create a stable wormhole and shoot the black hole elsewhere. The problem here is keeping the wormhole stable long enough for the black hole to get at least more than halfway into it. This would require mastery of the 3rd dimension and the ability to safely cause it to quake without destroying it's surrounding

Of course both ways are beyond humanity at this time.

 

[RobDaBank]

blow up a nearby sun and spout nonsense about how it causes a gravitational shift altering the course of the black hole... Plausible...

 

[OneCatch]

How about creating a bomb that when detonated will lower the temperature of an area to the absolute zero (0K ; -273.15°C). AFAIK nothing can move at that temperature.

There you have it. You would just have to occasionally shoot the same bomb in the area (tho that is impossible since the bomb would freeze as soon as it enters the area. But people don't need to know that.

Nah, that won't do it. It's simply the vibration and excitation of molecules and atoms that doesn't occur at absolute zero, but other impulses work as normal. Gravity isn't somehow 'switched off' by cooling something down, and normal kinetics still move supercooled objects.

Magnetism kind of can be turned off, but that's altogether different and involves different principles. Aand, that gives me an excuse to post this rather cool video:

 

[Jonluw]

Well, if it's a rogue black hole it oughta move according to gravity, right?

Find yourself some supermassive object. Maybe another black hole evern, and use it to bend spacetime so as to offset the course of the black hole.

 

[Denamic]

I think you might be seriously underestimating the scale here.
A black hole is many times the size of our solar system, or rather, its influence is.
To escape extinction, we don't do anything to the black hole; we just fucking run away.
Leave the bulk of the population behind; doesn't matter, we'll likely die anyway.
Decades in deep space doesn't make survival likely.

 

[Sir Broccoli]

Destroy it using the power of FRIENDSHIP!

Or make a second black hole and use it to change the course of the first black hole. Whatever suits you.

 

[RJ 17]

Yeah...I don't get how you intend to overpower the most powerful destructive force that exists in nature. Anything that passes beyond the event horizon of a black hole is ripped asunder particle by particle. As such any fictional technology to get rid of a black hole would have to be something that doesn't involve getting too close to the blackhole itself.

Since the question is science fiction though, that means that the answer gets to be science fiction as well. Since the motion of the black hole has it "rolling" along the fabric of space-time, all you'd need to do is create a device capable of distorting that fabric enough to get the black hole to "roll" in a different direction. Granted, the power source for such a device would likely have to be another black hole, but that's the best sci-fi way that I could come up with to save the solar system from a black hole.

The concept is based off this classic experiment that demonstrates gravity and orbit:


The rubber sheet the weight is sitting in is the fabric of space-time. So imagine the weight is the rogue black hole, you'd have to create a device capable of distorting space-time enough to make the black hole begin "sinking" towards the device.

 

[SpAc3man]

Create another much bigger black hole positioned so the original black hole is between Earth and the new black hole. The new black hole will have to initially be moving away from the old one. Make sure the black holes are positioned at a correct distance so the original one reverses direction or stops moving far away enough from Earth that we are still all sweet.

Or create a long line of black holes leading away from earth. Eventually they will all gather near the centre of the line.

 

[Drops a Sweet Katana]

You can't. Short and simple. You're just several shades of pooched.

If this is hard sci-fi, either ditch the idea of a black hole or explore how everyone would react or something in that vane.

 

[Dr. Cakey]

Since the current plan is to shoot an anti-black hole device at the black hole (I assume it works on the same principle as throwing Phoenix Down at an Undead enemy), this sci-fi is about as hard as Jell-O, so I have a foolproof method of thwarting the black hole.

1. Get a spaceship - any one will do, as long as it has an antimatter reactor. Those can do anything.
2. Turn off the safeties on flux capacitor. In this scenario, our flux must have unlimited capacity.
3. Go to warp and fly near to the black hole.
4. As you are being sucked in, wait until you have crossed the event horizon (if you start becoming dead due to severe gravitational forces and radiation, change the phase shift of the shields and reroute power from the auxiliary backup generators.
5. In the event horizon, eject the warp core. Remember, you must still be at warp when you do this.
6. Everything will break, and there will probably be a giant explosion - there usually is. This will kill you.
7. Reverse the polarity of the main deflector dish and use it to fire a concentrated polaron burst at the oncoming explosion. This will push the ship out of subspace and away from the explosion.
8. Communications should still be online. The aliens who live inside the black hole will come out. Apologize for blowing up the black hole. They will accept your apology and return to the alternate universe on the other side of the singularity.

 

[rayen020]

this is gonna turn out to be a horror novel. one way or the other the gravity well of the black hole is going to mess with time perception. so either your heros are gonna get out to space try the device and turn around to come back to a dead planet, or your gonna get people that get out and find that earth is already being consumed and the time dilation has caused people to not realize what has happened yet.

You cannot stop a black hole. black holes are the immovable objects and the unstoppable forces. you could divert it maybe. at best.

 

[DioWallachia]

So I have this idea for a short story. It mainly involves a mission by astronauts to get rid of a Rogue Black Hole (that's a Black Hole that moves, incase you didn't know) that will swallow up the Earth and Sun if it isn't stopped. How would one hypothetically do this?

My current idea is a bomb so powerful that (with a touch of space-magic) it counteracts the gravitational force of the Black Hole and basically fizzles it out. But I then thought that such a bomb would have to infinitely powerful, and an infinitely powerful explosion would just blow up the universe.

So, hypothetically, how do you think we could solve this problem?

NOOOOOOOOOO!! NOT SPACE MAGIC!!! IT BURNS WITH THE POWER OF A THOUSAND PLOT HOLES!!!!!!!!!!!