(urth) Problematic element in chronology - Red Giants

[David Stockhoff]

On 5/29/2011 12:41 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> Jeff has proposed some alternatives.  Personally I think the simplest 
> thing is to believe that there is indeed a black hole in the sun, as 
> everyone in the story agrees.  It may not be swallowing the sun 
> rapidly due to the formation of an accretion disk which pushes 
> infalling matter away from it. On first principles, one might expect 
> such a black hole to make the sun hotter, but it would be hard to 
> prove that no mechanism exists that could cause a reverse effect!
>
> As for the white hole, one might expect an explosive encounter, but 
> since white holes don't actually exist it is hard to be sure of one's 
> predictions in that regard.  Wolfe has also referred to a form of 
> anti- matter which is repulsive to gravity.  If such anti-matter 
> exists, it seemingly has negative energy, and it might be that the 
> White Fountain also does, in which case it might conceivably just 
> cancel out the black hole.when it collides, leaving only second-order 
> perturbatory effects. 

Is there wiggle room (in terms of Popular Mechanics-level 1970s theory) 
for a theory of black holes that makes them basically a reverse of 
(nonexistent) white fountains? That is: can a black hole be thought of 
crudely as primarily a "drain"?

Keeping in mind that any set of beings capable of "bringing" a white 
fountain ought to be able to pull off the reverse. As far as we know, 
every star has a pair of sealed pipes (labeled IN and OUT) that can be 
opened and hooked up to a pump and an energy source or drain. You just 
have to know your way around the the sub-basement and interior walls as 
well as the local building codes and approval processes. ;)

Or, just ignore the accretion disk and other effects because they 
interfere with the story. Done.

I might note that Typhon referred to the effect on solar output as 
amounting to a few percent at most. If you "figure" (calculate or 
assume) that that's enough to cool Urth, you don't really need to 
calculate the effect of processes that are poorly understood anyway and 
probably have a margin of error larger than that few percent.


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