I wonder if black holes might be usable as cosmic-scale batteries. Suppose your civ was preparing to settle in for long-term survival into the super distant future. You might not need high amounts of energy, just a low constant supply for incredibly long amounts of time. You could drop a good percentage of a galaxy's mass into a black hole, then use the evaporated Hawking radiation over cosmological time scales to power your civ.
Suppose that the entities living inside this civ are simulations. A second to us might be tens of thousands of years to them, because their hardware processing runs very slowly because of the low amounts of available energy.
Or for young whipper-snapper civilizations who want to live faster, you could turn that black hole + galaxy-sized mass into a really big hydro-electric plant -- that is, power your civ from the potential energy.
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I wonder if black holes might be usable as cosmic-scale batteries. Suppose your civ was preparing to settle in for long-term survival into the super distant future. You might not need high amounts of energy, just a low constant supply for incredibly long amounts of time. You could drop a good percentage of a galaxy's mass into a black hole, then use the evaporated Hawking radiation over cosmological time scales to power your civ.
Suppose that the entities living inside this civ are simulations. A second to us might be tens of thousands of years to them, because their hardware processing runs very slowly because of the low amounts of available energy.
Or for young whipper-snapper civilizations who want to live faster, you could turn that black hole + galaxy-sized mass into a really big hydro-electric plant -- that is, power your civ from the potential energy.
There's a lot of energy to be had simply in pushing black holes around 'til they crash into each other.