this is a story from December 19, 2009, but i thought it would be neat to share this.
A black future
Without destroying the Earth, the Large Hadron Collider might help humans explore the cosmos
By Tom Siegfried
December 19th, 2009; Vol.176 #13 (p. 26)
Shortly after the first of the year (if not already), the Large Hadron Collider — the most powerful particle accelerator ever built — will smash protons together at record energies. If the Earth remains intact, doomsayers will once again have been falsified. Every time they forecast the demise of the planet, those prophets of Earthly annihilation prove themselves no more foresightful than mortgage bankers or phony psychics.
This time, the fear of physics focuses on the prospect that the LHC, housed in a tunnel circling beneath the Swiss and French countryside outside Geneva, will condense mass-energy densely enough to create small black holes. Since black holes gobble up any matter that enters them, digesting it in a bottomless gravitational pit, perhaps Geneva, then France and Switzerland, the rest of Europe and the entire planet might all be swallowed and then shredded to subatomic smithereens, a handful of litigious LHC critics have contended.
*snip*
But there is another source of cosmic-class power that could perhaps be exploited to drive space vessels: the energetic emissions from black holes. That strategy does not leap immediately to mind, perhaps because black holes have the reputation of swallowing up mass and energy (famously confining even light). But as Stephen Hawking (a Star Trek fan himself) discovered, physics permits (and therefore requires) a black hole to emit “Hawking radiation” — particles and photons that slowly diminish the black hole’s mass as they stream away. Left on its own, with no source of food, a black hole shrinks as surely as a helium balloon with a pinhole leak.
Here’s the best part: The smaller a black hole gets, the faster it shrinks. So a very small black hole spews out very large amounts of energy. A very, very small black hole — much smaller, say, than even an atom — would emit enough energy to, well, power a starship. Such black holes would release a much higher percentage of the energy used to make them than does either hydrogen or antimatter.
Just possible
Black holes produced at the LHC would not be any good for starship fuel. They would be so small that their decay would take only a tiny fraction of a second, which is also why they pose no danger of breaking the doomsayers’ perfect record of being wrong. But perhaps it is possible to create a black hole a little bigger, one that would produce a sufficient amount of Hawking radiation, for long enough, to drive a massive vessel across space to reach other stars in a reasonable time.
read much much more:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/50326/title/A_black_futureit explains how there's a possibility of using Hawking radiation to fuel starships capable of exploring the galaxy:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/download/id/50405/name/Mass_and_lifetime_of_subatomic-sized_black_holes
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