| I've always wanted to have a black-hole file-shredder on display on my desk. Not a big one, just a tiny speck that would generate crazy space-time distortion effects. I figured that it would be hard to contain on earth because it would fall to the center of the earth. So the trick is to build it in orbit. It seem far fetch but once you decide to work in space it opens plenty of engineering shortcuts to scale-up the LHC. Space is very big, and it's already cold and a good enough vacuum, so you just need to maintain in position a few superconducting electromagnets. You collide a few high energy particle to form one and you nurture it to make it grow. Initially you move it by shining light or throwing things in it when the black-hole is less than 1kg, thanks to momentum conservation it's as easy as playing marbles. Once it is in position you feed it anything you want and you build your space station and desk around the black hole. The more you shred things in it, the more mass it gets and the harder it will be to move around, but the greater the space-time distortion. Funds you ask ? Price per kg in orbit has gone down tremendously. And there are plenty of rich people ready to use cryonics to attain immortality, so it didn't took much to convince one of them to hedge on a safer alternative to gain time. Because you see time pass slower near a black hole, and thanks to Einstein's General Relativity that has been known for more than a century. So instead of dying you get closer to your personal black-hole and you fast forward the future until the tech is ready to save you. How could have I predicted that another stealth start-up (sponsored by the same guy ! as I later discovered) would have exactly the same idea, and now there are two black-holes orbiting earth and no way to divert them. Once they collide in exactly 1337 days their combined momentum won't allow them to orbit earth anymore... |
In the other story (whose title I don't recall, but it was probably published in Analog), a bare something (perhaps a wormhole whose other end is in open space) is created, and begins to suck the Earth's air away. The hero builds a dome around it, but leaves a valve in the side to sell vacuum.