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.
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] @[email protected] 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.
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?
my guess based on how big supernovas are (bigger than that. no matter how much you estimate “that” to be), the answer is “enough”
anyway so there’s a point in Portal 2 where you fire a portal at a surface that’s far enough away that there’s noticeable light-speed delay before the portal opens, right?
but is that based on the distance between portals or the distance from the gun?
like, in the game’s specific scenario, the distinction is irrelevant, but the portal gun is mobile after all. what if you set up a portal on earth, then hop in a rocket to pluto, then when you land, you fire it at the surface of pluto.
The distance between the gun and the surface is minimal, but the portal pair you just set up is about 5 light-hours long.
Does it take 5 hours for the portal to open? or does it open instantly?
anyway the fact the aperture science facility extended so deep underground in portal 2 was interesting.
hey, you know what a very deep underground facility would be real useful for? dropping stuff through portals and having it fall a long time, accelerating as much as possible.
I bet there’s a borehole we never see that’s just top to bottom and has as much atmosphere as possible evacuated from it, to lower air resistance
@[email protected]
In @[email protected] '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.
@[email protected] the gamma rays are gonna be mostly negligible when you get hit with particulate accelerated with a foe of energy
@[email protected] I was thinking that the portal would be very short-lived, because the surface you placed it on would be quickly destroyed, but there’d be a short period where the initial gamma rays make it through.
but yeah, if you can somehow keep it open longer than milliseconds after the instant of the star’s collapse, you’d absolutely wreck anything near the endpoint
@[email protected] 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.
@[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] speaking of relativity, how about the fact that supposedly can’t be placed on moving surfaces? Moving according to whose reference point?
@[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”.
@[email protected] but how does this relate to Primer?
@[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]
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] 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] 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] Exclusive footage of Cave Johnson after performing the “turn star off” experiment dropped.