Thank you! I didn’t feel like checking with the difference in masses, and based my assumption on Stephen Hawking’s statement that an earth-mass black hole (with an event horizon the size of a pea) would glow from Into The Universe: The Story of Everything. It seems he exaggerated, assuming this calculator is accurate and my understanding of its values is fair. Such an exaggeration is disappointing, if not entirely surprising.
It is worthwhile to note that the above is highly reductive. A “black hole” is the sort of “hole” in spacetime you’re thinking of. It is caused, however, by gravitational dilation of spacetime by an incredibly high energy density. If you stuff enough matter and energy into a tiny enough space, the gravitational force will be strong enough that no other force in the universe can keep it from getting closer, and closer. Even the forces which keep neutrons and protons from combining with each other will be surmounted, as the energy density increases asymptotically toward infinity. This tiny point of effectively infinite density is the black hole’s “singularity”. Surrounding this singularity is a region where anything (matter, light, space itself) that gets within that range cannot escape. This is because objects have escape velocities based on their masses. If you’re going fast enough, you’ll fly away from the earth never to return. If you’re not going that fast, eventually you’ll fall back down. The further you are from the earth, the easier it is to escape it. The “black” part of the black hole, called the “event horizon”, is the distance from the singularity at which the black hole’s escape velocity is equal to the speed of light, meaning that, closer than that, nothing can escape it. Hence why it’s “black”, because no light is escaping from it. Technically, a black hole is not perfectly black due to hawking radiation, and a black hole with a 0.5 meter schwarzchild radius would probably be small enough to visibly glow (just a bit). (probably not, see below)
Forget 1954. Try 1914. Solar steam generation which can drive a dynamo.
Also, solar thermal generation was viable a hundred years ago, but nobody invested in it.
It also clearly cites it at the bottom. Its not like this is plagiarism. Its clearly making the point that this is the new, awful truth of the world before us, and maybe we need a few avengers, like little Billy Ignore Instructions and his vindictive mom.