Tensile Strength and the Mining of Black Holes

Abstract

There are a number of important thought experiments that involve raising and lowering boxes full of radiation in the vicinity of black hole horizons. This paper looks at the limitations placed on these thought experiments by the null energy condition, which imposes a fundamental bound on the tensile-strength-to-weight ratio of the materials involved, makes it impossible to build a box near the horizon that is wider than a single wavelength of the Hawking quanta and puts a severe constraint on the operation of 'space elevators' near black holes. In particular, it is shown that proposals for mining black holes by lowering boxes near the horizon, collecting some Hawking radiation and dragging it out to infinity cannot proceed nearly as rapidly as has previously been claimed and that as a consequence of this limitation the boxes and all the moving parts are superfluous and black holes can be destroyed equally rapidly by threading the horizon with strings.

arXiv comment23 pages

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• Firewalls From Double Purity
• Spacetime and Universal Soft Modes --- Black Holes and Beyond
• Effective field theory models for nonviolent information transfer from black holes
• An Uneventful Horizon in Two Dimensions
• The Black Hole Interior in Quantum Gravity
• The Smeared Null Energy Condition
• Reanalyzing an Evaporating Black Hole
• Statistical physics of black holes as quantum-mechanical systems
• Energy and Information Near Black Hole Horizons
• Firewalls and flat mirrors: An alternative to the AMPS experiment which evades the Harlow-Hayden obstacle
• Black Hole and de Sitter Microstructures from a Semiclassical Perspective
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• Black Holes, Entropies, and Semiclassical Spacetime in Quantum Gravity
• Why Firewalls Need Not Exist
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• Relativeness in Quantum Gravity: Limitations and Frame Dependence of Semiclassical Descriptions
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• Extracting Hawking Radiation Near the Horizon of AdS Black Holes
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