[menssen]

I think you're being down-voted because you are sort of wrong about the distances. We could probably get some people to another star. Why we would do that, or what we would tell them (with a five year communication delay) after they got there, is unclear.

For the record, I think your questioning of "what black holes really are" is prudent. The OP article is not prudent, firstly because any of its implications won't be realized for at least 3,000 years. Secondly because our challenge as a society is very much not speculating about this thing Hawking wrote about, and very much is trying to make any of these scenarios useful to us.

Which leads to my fringe opinion that we should try really hard to build a black hole, even if we're worried about it ending us.

"Fuckin' magnets. HOW DO THEY WORK?"

[darkpuma]

> "I think you're being down-voted because you are sort of wrong about the distances."

Or maybe it's because he proposed we dedicate our resources to violating the laws of thermodynamics ("free energy"...)

[Elrac]

For clarification and in Tesla's defense: If I've correctly read some of the descriptions of his idea, it didn't involve "energy from nothing" and hence no obvious violation of thermodynamics. Rather, it involved (roughly) building huge antennas/lightning rods to tap into the natural electric potential (against ground) of the ionosphere.

As I understand it, the idea is simply impractical. But there's a huge Tesla fan base among the intersection of conspiracy theorists and amateur (pseudo)scientists who believe that Tesla's idea was scuttled and suppressed by Big Electric to protect their monopoly on generating electricity in harder ways.

[darkpuma]

I can't fathom why anybody in their right mind would choose to call their scheme "free energy", e.g. choose to associate themselves with perpetual motion nuts. We can get electrical energy from sunlight, which is pretty damn neat, and nobody calls that "free energy."

[caymanjim]

Any black hole we could conceivably create would completely evaporate in nanoseconds. There's even conjecture that the LHC may have created some already (although it's not probable, it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility). It's not like they stick around eating more once you make them.