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B-Brain, Black Hole Brain
V616 Monocerotis
Image from Steve Bowers, using Celestia addon by Lafuente_Astronomy
V616 Monocerotis, a black hole binary in the Terragen Sphere which has been partially converted to a computational substrate

An advanced processing entity based upon a computational substrate composed of the Cauchy horizon of a black hole. Also known as a B-Brain.

The physical basis for a B-Brain is the indestructibility of information when crossing an event-horizon, and the exploitation of particular properties of time dilation. In theory the information falling into a black hole is not lost, but can be retrieved from near the event horizon (with some difficulty).

A B-Brain based upon the roughly 4.3x106 solar mass of the central galactic black hole would have an almost incalculably high toposophic potential. However few black-hole brains appear to have been ever constructed in the Terragen Sphere, and all of these have been converted to other uses in due course. Instead, the most advanced archailects known, the Great Archailects, use Wormhole Brains, which have no event horizon.

A number of detected extragalactic civilisations have been observed to use black hole brains, including the civilisation in NGC 3109; some of these civilisations do not appear to have developed wormhole technology, or may distrust it for some reason.

Rotating black holes can also be used to generate very large amounts of energy using various mechanical means, such as the Penrose Process and superradiance; the energy produced by such pathways could be sufficient to supply enough energy to power an advanced civilisation for billions of years, especially from a rotating supermassive black hole. Even without exploiting the computational potential of the black hole's event horizon, an advanced civilisation could produce enough energy for vast amounts of information processing.

Retrieving information from inside a black hole

To access the information and mass-energy hidden inside the event horizon of a black hole, some speculative cosmologists have suggested that wormholes could be sent beneath the Schwarzschild radius and retrieve data from within. However, the space-time curvature around a stellar-mass black hole is too extreme to allow even tiny comm-gauge wormholes to be used. The curvature around most galactic supermassive black holes (SMBHs) should allow the passage of comm-gauge wormholes and their support structures, but there are no SMBHs within the Terragen Sphere. Observations by the Argus Array suggest that certain distant galaxies support xenosophont black-hole-brains which may include comm-gauge wormhole access, but this evidence is ambiguous.

A few stupendously large black holes (SLBHs) such as Phoenix A are so large that it may be possible to safely extend a traversable wormhole beneath the event horizon, but all known SLBHs are many billions of light years distant, and can only be observed as they were billions of years in the past. No evidence of advanced civilisation has been seen in the vicinity of these massive objects so far.
 
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Appears in Topics
ComputronicsISOtechSpace-Time Engineering
Transapientech / Godtech / Clarketech
 
Development Notes
Text by Adam Getchell
Additional material by Steve Bowers
Initially published on 25 April 2007.

image by steve bowers added october 2025
 
 
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