I apologize if I get some of the sciency stuff wrong, quantum physics is not my specialty.
If it were possible to create a tiny black hole, would a practical use for it be to turn it into a garbage dump? I don’t know if there’s a lot of things one can do with a tiny black hole (get yer mind outta the gutter!) other than study it, but suppose we make a couple of them with the Large Hadron Collidor. It’s pretty much a speck but get close enough to it and it’ll suck anything into it’s body without much increase in size. Wouldn’t that make for the world’s cleanest and smallest garbage dump? If we can stablize it, other than using it for mad scientist purposes, why can’t we use it for something mundane like getting rid of all this garbage mankind creates every second of every day?
When I watched the first Transformers movie, it confirmed one thing I had long speculated on: ocean pressure is like, totally a lot, especially at the bottom. Wouldn’t garbage dumped into the Marianas Trench stay there? If we loaded up cheap garbage barges and sent them out, why not dump shit down there and let the pressure keep it there for thousands of years? We could toss containers of nuclear waste in the trench without fear that anyone can ever get it, and knowing it’s not going to contaminate our groundwater or anything like that. What’s that problem? Price? Nuclear waste costs a bundle to store and nobody wants it, so why not put it in the one place on earth that unreachable by man and far away from civilization? As I see it, all you’d have to do it seal it in some container then sail a boat on top of the trench and push it overboard. Gravity will do the rest
We can’t make black holes and if I remember, the minimum mass required is some multiple of the sun. The event horizon and gravity gradient would certainly be bigger than the Earth.
Trench: Not all garbage sinks.
The stuff that sinks will drift on underwater currents.
Encasing in concrete would be insanely expensive.
The idea that the LHC might be able to make black holes is only true if an alternate theory about gravity, which predicts that black holes could form at much lower masses than previously believed, turns out to be correct. And if it is, the black holes that the LHC would form would immediately evaporate before they could accrete any further matter. In any event, a micro-black hole is so small that only a tiny trickle of matter could pass into it. You would probably need one as massive as a minor planet before it would be useful as a disposal system.
That’s the minimum mass necessary for a star to collapse into a black hole. In theory, it should be possible to create smaller black holes by compressing matter with an external force (i.e. not relying on gravity).
The problem with a small black hole is, it’s a very small target to drop anything into it. Any matter that drops towards the black hole but miss the event horizon would end up shooting back out. This is why very dense objects in the universe usually have accretion disks around them.
Also, the only safe place to keep black hole is in orbit. It takes a lot of energy to carry garbage up to it.
As for dropping nuclear waste into the Marianas Trench, I suspect there’s a very real danger that the containers will eventually disintegrate and release radioactive material into the water, contaminating a large area of the ocean. Water pressure doesn’t keep something pinned down to the ocean floor.
If you could dump things in black holes (can’t see why not) you could harness a lot of energy from the acceleration of the stuff you throw in. Like a Cosmic Turbine Generator…
Obviously, you’ll get it all the garbage thrown back at you shortly thereafter with the message “stop throwing your crap into our dimension”.
Pressure won’t keep things down at the bottom of the trench, it just squeezes them when they are there. If the containers in your scenario should fail and their contents mix with the water, simple pressure will not prevent that contaminated water dispersing into other areas.
Well the thing is do we really want to get rid of it? Garbage waste is not a problem despite what people will tell you. Yes we waste a lot but if there is one thing we do have a lot of it is surface area, stack it high and dig it deep. You never know what you might need anyways. There is a lot of crap in landfills that we may need back one day, certain metals for example. Or we may invent a way of changing atoms into other atoms, all that trash suddenly becomes lithium and helium .
Of all the problems man kind faces, waste is the one thing we do not have to worry about.
This is the best answer, by far. That ‘garbage’ contains many valuables.
Here in Minneapolis our trash is almost completely 100% recycled.
The city picks up metals (mostly empty cans), glass, plastics, batteries, cardboard, and newspaper/office paper. They also take yard waste during the spring & fall; other times of the year they operate a few compost sites where you can drop off extra yard waste (and pick up free compost for your lawn or garden). About 3-4 times per year they offer collection sites where you can bring other materials, like unused paint, aerosol containers, old electronics, etc. for recycling.
And all the other garbage put in your garbage bin goes to a center where it is screened to recover metal cans, etc., and then the rest of it is burned to generate energy used to heat downtown buildings. Even the ashes remaining after that are recycled; they are sold to farmers as fertilizer for their fields.
There is very, very little ‘garbage’ that is waster; almost all of it is recycled in some way. And at almost no cost – most years, the city makes money, or is at least close to breaking even on the recycling program – depending on the fluctuating prices of recycled materials and the amount collected.
To think of throwing all this valuable material away, especially into an inaccessible place like the Marianas Trench, is just foolish. Local landfills are at least easily available for mining in future years.
Well, if we could build a micro black hole, what diameter would the event horizon be? Let’s be extremely generous and say it has a 1mm diameter. To throw anything into it would maddening. It’s be like taking a 1 mm drill bit and trying to make something disappear by poking 1mm holes out of it.
Oh, then there’s the problem of when physicists finally learn to turn plastic soda-pop bottles into gold. How would be get all of our bottles back out of the singularity?
And of course, a 1 mm diameter would correspond to a significant fraction of the mass of the entire planet.
Now, there is the potential to use a black hole for power generation, as Fiendish Astronaut says. It might be worthwhile to drop stuff in a black hole for that reason. But it’d be foolish to use something as valuable as garbage, when any old matter would work as well.
As for the notion of pressure keeping things at the bottom of the ocean, not only is that wrong, it’s actually reversed. Ultimately, the fact that pressure increases with depth is what causes things to float.
Godzilla is hundreds of millions, possibly over a billion years old. His association with nuclear tests, wastes, and other environmental problems is mere speculation by Japanese news reporters.
