A Distributed Artificial Black Hole Acceleration Infrastructure
Instead of carrying large amounts of propellant aboard a spacecraft, what if we placed numerous artificial black-hole (BH) generation devices throughout space?
The idea would be to create small, short-lived black holes at specific locations and use their gravitational fields to give a spacecraft a series of small accelerations.
Rather than building one enormous, fixed acceleration ring, we could distribute many “gravitational nodes” throughout space and select different nodes depending on the spacecraft’s destination and desired trajectory. In principle, this could allow acceleration in any direction in three-dimensional space.
The purpose would not be to use black holes as the spacecraft’s engines, but to move the energy required for propulsion off the spacecraft and into the infrastructure.
If the spacecraft no longer had to carry most of its propulsion energy, it could be made smaller and lighter, leaving more mass available for payload.
Once a star system had its own power-generation facilities and BH-generation nodes, those facilities could eventually become part of an interstellar transportation network.
Unlike a Dyson swarm, the entire star would not necessarily have to be covered. The infrastructure could be built incrementally, starting wherever it was needed.
Of course, there are enormous problems to solve—most obviously, how to create and control artificial black holes, and how to decelerate a spacecraft after reaching relativistic speeds.
This is not a proposal for technology that is currently feasible. It is simply a thought experiment about whether such a system could be consistent with known physics.