04-05-2021, 03:48 AM
(04-05-2021, 02:56 AM)stevebowers Wrote: Remember as well that a DWIZ does emit a lot of energy - transmutation up to iron is exothermic. Sure, you can use some of this waste heat to power processes, but there will always be a lot of waste heat at the end of the process.
Quite true - you don't want to cook/irradiate nearby star systems while creating this or any other large construct.
That said - an extended construction time of hundreds or thousands of years will help. And things like Matrioshka shells to get the waste energy to do useful work. And - possibly - you could set up one or more good size black holes in the vicinity and use them as 'ultimate heat sinks'. The more energy you dump into them the bigger they get and the better they work, pretty much w/o limit. We kicked this last idea around a bit in connection with S5 minds some time back but it didn't fully gel.
Not saying that the above methods alone are guaranteed to do the job - we need to run some numbers around this to get an idea of the size and shape of this particular elephant. But they do indicate there are various potential methods that might be used to bring waste energy levels down to some form of 'acceptable' (depending on how one defines that term).
Todd