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.
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.
@foone@digipres.club
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.
The only thing more Cave Johnson would be using relativistic weapons to blow up the sun
@foone@digipres.club “… 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
@foone@digipres.club @garrwolfdog@yiff.life Without even seeing your first toot, I read this in Cave Johnson’s voice. Bravo, good job.
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.
@foone@digipres.club but how does this relate to Primer?
@foone@digipres.club speaking of relativity, how about the fact that supposedly can’t be placed on moving surfaces? Moving according to whose reference point?
@foone@digipres.club 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.
@foone@digipres.club i think 1) what travels at the speed of light is the shot from the portal gun to the surface
@foone@digipres.club There’s a Cave Jonson voice line that mentions the possibility that testing the ASHPoD may involve “trace amount of time travel”.
Maybe not one that lets you trivially violate causality but with moving portals or multiple portals, whoops…
Anyway once you’re flying around the universe with your FTL portal-rockets the next question is what happens if the two ends of a portal are moving at different speeds through time. What if you drop one end into a black hole?
And what if you put one end on an enemy planet and the other end in low orbit around Betelgeuse when it finally goes supernova?
How many gamma rays will come through a hole in space about a meter across?
@foone@digipres.club
In @cstross@wandering.shop 's Glasshouse, they would drop one end of a very small portal into a blue giant star and the other end over to some kind of power plant, and they’d have all the energy and all the power they’d ever need.
my guess based on how big supernovas are (bigger than that. no matter how much you estimate “that” to be), the answer is “enough”
@foone@digipres.club the gamma rays are gonna be mostly negligible when you get hit with particulate accelerated with a foe of energy
@foone@digipres.club My first thought was the Stargate thing where the effects go through the portal, but they didn’t have the other in a black hole, just near it.
Would that make the portal one-way? Would it allow things to escape the event horizon? Would a portal even be able to go into one? What makes a surface capable of holding a portal? Would those properties cease in a black hole? Interesting questions.
@foone@digipres.club
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.
@foone@digipres.club 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.
@foone@digipres.club You just so happened to catch me while I had enough gunk in my throat to have a proper shake at the voice
@DotMaetrix@chitter.xyz awesome!
@foone@digipres.club Exclusive footage of Cave Johnson after performing the “turn star off” experiment dropped.
@foone@digipres.club 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
@foone@digipres.club 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.
@foone@digipres.club probably the best pitch for Portal 3 so far
@rolenthedeep@rattodon.nexus valve’s got my resume, they’re welcome to hire me anytime :)
@foone@digipres.club 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
@foone@digipres.club 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).
@foone@digipres.club 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.