Some serious physicists think they have good ideas about how to build interstellar spacecraft based on Dark power: Grand designs for interstellar travel
In August, physicist Jia Liu at New York University outlined his design for a spacecraft powered by dark matter (arxiv.org/abs/0908.1429v1). Soon afterwards, mathematicians Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland at Kansas State University in Manhattan proposed plans for a craft powered by an artificial black hole (arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803).
No one disputes that building a ship powered by black holes or dark matter would be a formidable task. Yet remarkably there seems to be nothing in our present understanding of physics to prevent us from making either of them.
Of course, there is the whole issue of Galactic cooling to be considered. It seems that the galaxy may be heading into an ice age, and if we use up all our energy driving space craft all over the place, what will we have left to heat the planets? The Greenland permafrost will get even frostier. They’ll probably open a Wendy’s.
Anyway, if they do start steaming around the universe in black hole driven starships, they’d better be careful not to drive right off the edge of everything into another universe. There might be monsters there. Or even worse, environmentalists. You know how that will go… they’ll start berating us for using up non-renewable resources like black holes and dark matter.
Then somebody will make a movie about the heat-death of the multi-verse and terrify everyone at the Intergalactic Preservation Cosmological Commission, and before you know it, someone will want to tax black hole harvesting.
And that will only be the beginning.
