Gravity gun Vs Portal gun

[Rossum]

I suppose you could develop a pretty nice portal network using just one portal gun if you had a way to system to move it or fire it at seperate needed locations. Like you could fire an orange portal at an arid farming community, then travel to a place with lots of fresh water and put in a blue portal. Have the people pump or drain as much water as they need and then you travel to another place to drop one of the portals.

It could go:

O. Arid farmland #1
B. Source of fresh water
O. Arid farmland #2
B. Big city that could use the crops from Arid farmland #2
O. Another big city to travel or trade to
B. Tropical vacation spot people from city travel to...


And so on and so forth, you'd be the one traveling all over with your portal gun but in doing so you can pave the way for lots of stuff to be ported through.

You could also go to disaster areas and plop portals linking them with stable areas where rescue teams could come through or people could evacuate. Not sure how much water or liquid a portal could conceivably transport but I'm sure there is a way to make a difference there. (Quick question: How big was the hole on that BP oil rig spill? I'm guessing it would be too big to just plop a Portal over the top and divert it all to a big reservoir somewhere. Or you can't build an oil refinery in the middle of the salt flats and then bring oil there by somehow digging holes and dropping steel plates with a portal on them)

[Zixinus]

I wouldn't start thinking too much about legitimate business ventures: if there is even a hint to the public that you have such a technology, someone will take it from you forcefully (it can just as easily be a big corporation as well as some government).

Illegitimate though only barely get safer. Yeah, sure, you can easily go trough any fence, but you are still not immune to cameras and other safety systems.

[Skgoa]

... and most valuable things are in enclosures made of AT LEAST glass.

Actually, at first I would bring in only a few people in whom I trust. Then we would try to get our university interested. I personally know at least two professors who are on the boards of federal science funding organisations and one who has gotten quite good at raising funds from the EU. And thats just my faculty, I also know a professor who is involved in ESA's human space flight program and is friends with high-up people there and at the german version of NASA. Those people could get funding for reverse-engineering the portal device. Yeah, its not a get-rich-quick scheme, but its for the good of all of us. (Except the ones who are dead.) And as far as I am concerned, as long as I get like 1% of the profits from the resulting patents and/or get to be a co-founder of the start-up that commercializes the technology, I get enough.

edit: There might be quite a lot of politicing about which research institute gets its hands on it, at first. But I will push to sign a contract that says "the legal owner of the device is Dresden Technical University, it may only be lent to other institutes for a period of no longer than 3 month and only with consent from both the University's Senate and the orginal finder [my name here]" or something similar. If anyone is willing to shell out huge sums of money... hey, think about how much other SCIENCE my alma mater could do with that! Or we could get a spa, free food in the cafeteria etc. etc., if we run out of constructive ways to spend it.

[Skgoa]

... and once again, I get an idea right after the edit window closes.

@The tangent of there being only two portals at a time: We know for a fact that seperate portal devices can operate at the same time and very close to each other. Also, portal devices can be built as to long vertical bars, so that the portals form doorways. I don't think it would take long until we will get rid of all long and medium distance travel and transport of anything bigger than what fits through a portal. If we can get them to be reprogramable*, they might replace front doors once cost comes down through mass production. (Well, no, but every house would/should have one.) If not, they would at least get as ubiquutous as bus stops or as telephone booths once were.

* Reprogramable in the sense that one can truly choose an arbitrary other "doorway" portal device, since while we have seen a "doorway" being able to connect to three different other doorways, we would need a way to update the available destinations.