Imagine a black hole.

For one, it’s a hard thing to imagine. It’s neither black, nor a hole. It does not have a color, even though you can clearly see the surrounding matter in the accretion disk, which glows brightly. And it is not a hole either: just the remnants of dead stars, that has been compressed by its own gravity into an infinitely small point, from which nothing, not even light, can escape.

Another problem is that even outside its event horizon (aka. the point of no return, if you’re a photon), physics gets… weird. Time and space don’t behave like we are used to. Time doesn’t pass the same way for anyone in the vicinity. And all the mass swirling around the black hole is heating up, sending out deadly radiation.

In short, a black hole is nothing you’d want to live next to. Anything that goes into it — energy, or matter — is lost, as far as we can tell.

And yet: You can build a bomb out of a black hole. And if you can build a bomb, you can extract energy from it too, meaning you can use a black hole to generate nearly infinite energy — more than enough to power entire civilizations (YouTube). The reason? Black holes spin, and you can use that to steal energy from it.

Our universe is weird.

Bitcoin

Considering how much energy bitcoin uses today, it might be worth investigating a black hole energy source sooner than later. A study estimates bitcoin’s ludicrous energy consumption somewhere between 2.6GW to 7.7GW — enough to power a few million households.

Meanwhile, the whole premise of Bitcoin is being called into question. It may end up needing centralization. Its usefulness as a means of exchange is diminishing. It doesn’t really solve the problem it intends to solve: the Blockchain Just Isn’t As Radical As You Want It To Be. And the believers of the blockchain might not have given enough thought to the cultural ramifications: Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous.

And finally, Bitcoin might just be plain un-economic (PDF, via), since it values, by design, censorship-proof decentralization over trust in a central entity, and that comes with a price.

Other interesting links from around the web:

• A Town Called Asbestos (YouTube)
• 5 Things That Sound, Move, or Smell Like a Nuclear Explosion
• Best bad idea ever? Why Putin’s nuclear-powered missile is possible… and awful
• Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter (YouTube)

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ESA’s Mars Express was mostly known for its failed “Beagle 2” lander, which never managed to communicate with earth after landing in 2003. What most people aren’t aware of is that Mars Express itself has been orbiting Mars since then, and has been collecting stunning pictures, amongst other things, revealing the Red Planet in stunning new ways.