Are black holes alien supercomputers? Scientists have an interesting theory

Scientists searching for alien civilizations should also investigate bursts of radiation from tiny black holes. Advanced civilizations could likely use them as extremely powerful quantum computers.

Physicists Georgi Dvali from the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Zaza Osmanov from the Free University of Tbilisi made this assumption. Their work is published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

Scientists have long known that at the edge of a black hole, called the event horizon, physics can become extremely strange. In particular, it means that neither matter nor light can escape from its gravitational grip after crossing this boundary.

Instead, the black hole emits a faint glow called the Hawking radiation. If the late physicist Stephen Hawking was right, then this radiation is actually the mass of the black hole that is slowly evaporating.

There is a theory among physicists that this radiation is not just some kind of background but literally information about what the black hole consumed. In other words, if you throw a planet into a black hole, the radiation will actually contain all the information about its mass, chemical composition, and other "parameters".

However, Hawking himself believed that this radiation was more likely to contain information disorder. For example, he said that the value of information would be the same as the value of ash from a burnt dictionary: all the information is still in it, but it is simply impossible to recover it.

Modern physicists suggest that we are simply not yet capable of recovering information from a black hole.

Meanwhile, Dvali and Osmanov suggest that a hypothetical highly advanced alien civilization might know how to read the radiation of black holes and use them as supercomputers.

They even suggest that "all sufficiently advanced civilizations eventually use black holes in their quantum computers."

Dvali and Osmanov believe that humans may be able to detect the data that comes out of black holes or the light from the powerful particle accelerators used to produce them. We just need to look harder for them.

How a quantum computer works

Inverse explains that a quantum computer, unlike a conventional computer, stores information not in bits but in qubits (quantum bits). The difference is that a typical computer encodes information with ones and zeros, and each bit of information is recorded in one of these states. Instead, a quantum computer "works" with subatomic particles, which have a much larger number of properties.

In addition, the data of a qubit can be in one state, but it can also be in both states simultaneously (until they are determined). That is, quantum computers represent information in the form of the probability of a quantum state at a given moment.

There is also a factor of entanglement of subatomic particles with each other, which ultimately leads to a complication of the possible state of any one qubit. However, in this case, the complexity is only for the better, since qubits can store more data and perform more calculations with it than ordinary bits.

This gives quantum computers greater speed and the ability to perform more complex calculations much faster. Of course, all this is currently known only in theory.

While people are trying to fit this theory into reality, Dvali and Osmanov believe that there is a high probability that more advanced civilizations on old planets around old stars have already figured it out.

The researchers also explain that a black hole would be an even faster quantum computer than one made of ordinary matter. The fact is that all matter in a black hole is compressed into a single point - a singularity - so it takes almost no time for information about qubits to move from one side of the black hole to the other.

Thus, a black hole should be a super-fast, super-efficient piece of computer hardware, as long as the operator avoids falling into it.

At the same time, the researchers do not even begin to speculate on how such a supercomputer could be made.

"We will not try to make any assumptions about the software that uses advanced extraterrestrial intelligence. The power of their programming and the sophistication of their algorithms are likely beyond our imagination," Dvali and Osmanov wrote in their paper.

They believe that the aliens can create tiny black holes with low mass on their own as they will have more Hawking radiation than ordinary holes. Scientists suggest that it is their radiation that hunters for alien civilizations should look for.

Earlier, OBOZ.UA told you that black holes can work as a time machine, but there is an unpleasant nuance.

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