The theoretical limit for your thermal efficiency is going to be based on the temperature of whatever you are cooling and the temperature of the environment you exhaust the waste heat into. Minimizing the latter is what he seems to be talking about here.
Since these equipment cannot
operate with perfect efficiency, they will need to eliminate waste heat.
Who says it has to operate at perfect efficiency? I would imagine that any slight improvement you get by incorporating a black hole into your cooling system (however the hell that would work) would be negated by the fact that a cooling system that involves a black hole is probably a bit expensive.
It might not be. Assuming you could find a black hole which is not actively engaged in swallowing something (and hence spewing out huge amounts of heat and relativistic particle jets), you could surround it with mirrors to create an internal volume with a very low photon temperature at relatively (in astronomical terms) mild expense.
Obviously a spherical shell would be unstable, but you don't need a contiguous shell to lower the internal temperature. A rotating ring (or easier, an orbiting series of small, overlapping satellites) would be stable (not in the orbital sense, but in that they wouldn't need to hold themselves up) and could use the thermal gradient between their sides to power their station-keeping. You could construct additional rings at greater distances, each with a different inclination, to cover more of the angular area.
Comments
The theoretical limit for your thermal efficiency is going to be based on the temperature of whatever you are cooling and the temperature of the environment you exhaust the waste heat into. Minimizing the latter is what he seems to be talking about here.
Since these equipment cannot operate with perfect efficiency, they will need to eliminate waste heat.
Who says it has to operate at perfect efficiency? I would imagine that any slight improvement you get by incorporating a black hole into your cooling system (however the hell that would work) would be negated by the fact that a cooling system that involves a black hole is probably a bit expensive.
It might not be. Assuming you could find a black hole which is not actively engaged in swallowing something (and hence spewing out huge amounts of heat and relativistic particle jets), you could surround it with mirrors to create an internal volume with a very low photon temperature at relatively (in astronomical terms) mild expense.
Obviously a spherical shell would be unstable, but you don't need a contiguous shell to lower the internal temperature. A rotating ring (or easier, an orbiting series of small, overlapping satellites) would be stable (not in the orbital sense, but in that they wouldn't need to hold themselves up) and could use the thermal gradient between their sides to power their station-keeping. You could construct additional rings at greater distances, each with a different inclination, to cover more of the angular area.