 The existence of Hawking radiation has a remarkable consequence: as Hawking (1976) pointed out and Unruh (1976) elaborated, the fact that a black hole radiates implies that it loses mass-energy, and so will shrink, in seeming violation of the Area Theorem. (The Area Theorem is not in fact violated; rather, one of its assumptions is, viz., that locally energy is always strictly positive.) Because there is no limit to this process except that imposed by the total initial mass of the black hole itself, eventually the black hole will radiate itself entirely away—it evaporates. This prediction clearly bears on the issue of cosmic censorship: if the end-state of the evaporation leaves the previously hidden singularity open for the rest of the universe to see, all the potential problems raised in  section 4  can arise. 