Bright Shiny New Home

I refuse to use the original title of this article. But it discusses the possibility that a black hole will prevent stars from forming in its galaxy by heating up the gasses around it.

In other words, slow killers, weakening the galaxies as one by one the older stars die while no new stars are able to form. It's the intergalactic form of the atomic bomb; find a way to harness black holes, speed up the dying process of stars (either seperately or by, I don't know, altering the black hole somehow), and turn it loose on the galaxies that belong to your enemies. Not that I'd advocate using something like this, but I don't think we're exactly in danger of that now. Though it provides some frightening ideas about the fact that we can make miniature black holes. Something to keep in mind if I ever need to write a huge multi-galaxy war.

Then again, in the same article it mentioned previous research indicating that black holes may help new stars form. Perhaps we could use the same methods to build our own new galaxies. And from there it's only a rather long, long step to custom building our own planets. I want mine to look like Christmas lights, but I'm not bringing any mice.