High gas prices are the problem. Black holes are the unlikely ultimate answer:
A new study finds that the supermassive black holes at the hearts of some galaxies are the most fuel efficient engines in the universe.
“If you could make a car engine that was as efficient as one of these black holes, you could get about a billion miles out of a gallon of gas,” said study team leader Steve Allen of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University. “In anyone’s book, that would be pretty green.”
Granted, we probably won’t really be harnessing them to power automobiles. But they’ve got to be good for something: probably enormous engineering projects a century or two down the road that we can only vaguely conceptualize at this point.
The article goes on to make the rather offbeat point that black holes are also “green” in the role they play in preventing the galacgtic version of urban sprawl — by basically sucking everything in the vicinity in and annihilating it all.
Er, okay. Pretty handy, huh?
UPDATE: Meanwhile, here’s the low-down on some less exotic energy alternatives.