05-09-2019, 03:49 AM
Adam Crowl has suggested a peculiar form of black hole civilisation; a supermassive black hole is a nice heat sink, and if it is rotating fast enough the infalling light from the rest of the universe (including the CMBR) would be blue-shifted and highly energetic. An inverted Dyson Sphere could be built to catch this light.
The downside is that time dilation could be ferocious. This was brought up in connection with the M87 picture, but it could be located around any large SMBH with plenty of rotation.
The Xeelee (in Stephen Baxter's novels) apparently like to live in huge ringworlds that orbit superrmassive blackholes, rotating at nearly the speed of light- I wonder if even magmatter would be strong enough for that (Xeelee use domain walls, if I recall correctly).
A reference for the technically-minded; Life under a Black Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.02897
The downside is that time dilation could be ferocious. This was brought up in connection with the M87 picture, but it could be located around any large SMBH with plenty of rotation.
The Xeelee (in Stephen Baxter's novels) apparently like to live in huge ringworlds that orbit superrmassive blackholes, rotating at nearly the speed of light- I wonder if even magmatter would be strong enough for that (Xeelee use domain walls, if I recall correctly).
A reference for the technically-minded; Life under a Black Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.02897