[KVFinn]

>Dear Readers: I apologize; there's one point in this article that's not quite right and ought to be clarified. Namely, when I said that a spaceship traveling exponentially close to the speed of light would collapse to a black hole: that's only true because, when the spaceship inevitably collided with some interstellar particle, the energy in the center-of-momentum rest frame would be exponential. A spaceship in a theoretical vacuum could get arbitrarily close to the speed of light without collapsing.

>However, it's important to understand that this doesn't change the computational situation in any important way. It's still true that, to accelerate exponentially close to the speed of light, you need an exponential amount of energy! And therefore, it will take you exponential time to accelerate to such a speed---unless your fuel tank (or whatever else is providing your energy) is exponentially concentrated, in which case it will exceed the Schwarzschild limit and indeed collapse to a black hole.

[rhth54656]

That is only true if assumed that the rocket will not gather additional energy on the trip.

Also the premise that the energy has to be concentrated to a certain are for the rocket to work is wrong. You can have as much energy on as large area as you want without reaching the critical mass and collapsing into a black hole. The rocket can be of any size to work.

Even so, a black hole is the perfect source of energy. Converting mass into energy without loss via hawking radiation. And the mass is collected when moving trough interstellar medium. Such micro black hole( it has to be small to radiate fast enough ) would still weight a lot and moving it would be difficult, but not impossible.