In Portal, using the portal gun to get to the moon is the obvious space travel usage, but I think people are overlooking how it’d let you trivially break the rocket equation.
Hell, you could build a >1g torchship using nothing but the ocean.
In Portal, using the portal gun to get to the moon is the obvious space travel usage, but I think people are overlooking how it’d let you trivially break the rocket equation.
Hell, you could build a >1g torchship using nothing but the ocean.
Sir Isaac Newton may be the deadliest son of a bitch in space, but the deadliest son of a bitch in the Half Life universe is Cave Johnson.
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I think this is predicated on the assumption that a portal acts as if it’s anchored the same way a bell is to a rocket engine.
I don’t think it is. Does anything in the games show a portal imparting thrust onto the wall/object it’s mounted on? I don’t think so. I think portals can’t be used for thrust.
It’s also pretty clear to me that transfer through a portal is instantaneous, not limited to lightspeed. You can hang out/change direction halfway through a portal as much as you want.
The Nihilanth could teleport an entire army to earth, the combine can conquer a planet in hours, the g-man has control over time and space, but Cave Johnson’s invention could put a hole in a planet
@[email protected] boring “explanation” that the energy which can cross a portal is limited by the power of the portal generator - so you can only accelerate to c if your generator can output that much juice - it’s not free just super efficient
Alternate ending to Half Life Alyx where it turns out the scary thing the Combine has locked up in the vault is Chell.
There’s also the gravity interaction: an infinitely falling object that never reaches the bigger body is also accelerating the bigger body.
Your forever falling object is shoving the earth upward, very slowly. That could matter in the long enough term… But it seems kinda meaningless compared to the other ways you could use a portal.
Still, might be handy if you need to adjust the orbit of a planet and are willing to wait.
@[email protected] Now this is bugging me too. If you actually wanted to loop a falling object between two portals and forget about it, would it have to be at one of the Earth’s poles? I feel as though otherwise the object would start to drift out from between the two portals due to the Coriolis effect (ignoring the fact that an object left falling like this at the equator would constantly be cancelling out whatever effect it produced 12 hours previously).
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This seems like a combination of https://what-if.xkcd.com/147/ and https://what-if.xkcd.com/12/
It would be a very Cave Johnson thing to try to fix global warming by pushing the earth away from the sun.
@[email protected] This actually happens in Chicken Invaders 5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtCrwF0RoO4&t=5965 then they mention staving off climate change in the last cutscene
The only thing more Cave Johnson would be using relativistic weapons to blow up the sun
@[email protected] “… with the lemons”
The lab boys tell me that if you dump enough iron into a star, it’ll turn off. Well, we don’t have that much iron on hand, but what if it’s moving at 99% the speed of light?
They told me that wouldn’t help, but I said pack your bags: We’re doing it anyway
@[email protected] Exclusive footage of Cave Johnson after performing the “turn star off” experiment dropped.
Portal 2 does establish that the portal-placing shot moves at the speed of light, but that just raises the question of how fast you move through the portals themselves.
It basically can’t be slower than light, or you’d chop yourself in half if you moved halfway into one and then backed out.
So it has to be lightspeed: which means, if relativity is still correct, that it’s also a time machine.
@[email protected] but how does this relate to Primer?
Maybe not one that lets you trivially violate causality but with moving portals or multiple portals, whoops…
@[email protected] speaking of relativity, how about the fact that supposedly can’t be placed on moving surfaces? Moving according to whose reference point?
@[email protected] the portals connect space, you don’t move through them at the speed of light, you move through them at whatever speed you move in the space around them since they’re no different than any other plane cut through it.
@[email protected] i think 1) what travels at the speed of light is the shot from the portal gun to the surface
@[email protected] There’s a Cave Jonson voice line that mentions the possibility that testing the ASHPoD may involve “trace amount of time travel”.
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In a book (Bobiverse) two moon sized bodies were accelerated to very close to speed of light, and hit a star, coming at it from opposite directions.
Result was described as basically a nova.
@[email protected] heavy coughing so the experiment went fine, it was quite interesting! the control group told me they’d be experiencing some influence as well, but it’s probably just some measuring error. at least that’s what the lab boys tell me.
@[email protected] You just so happened to catch me while I had enough gunk in my throat to have a proper shake at the voice
@[email protected] awesome!
@[email protected] @[email protected] Without even seeing your first toot, I read this in Cave Johnson’s voice. Bravo, good job.
@[email protected] don’t forget as well that the portal transit is instantaneous. Never mind the other implications, that alone breaks the universe in a number of exciting ways
@[email protected] I wonder if the lab boys can find a way to convert energy to matter. If so, then you get an infinite iron machine because a portal is an infinite energy machine. If it go brrrrrr fast enough, Johnson might be able to create enough iron to end the sun.
@[email protected] probably the best pitch for Portal 3 so far
@[email protected] valve’s got my resume, they’re welcome to hire me anytime :)
@[email protected] One wonders what kinds of electromagnetic interaction tricks you can do with portal technology as well. At the very least, you can build a computer that’s physically enormous while being linked together through portals as if it’s microscopically adjacent.