Wormhole Power Grid?

[Obloquium]

Can anyone think of an sf story or universe featuring a network of wormholes as a means of collecting and distributing power?

[SirNitram]

...Not really. Because defining a wormhole as 'Expensive' is akin to defining the centre of a fusion detonaton as 'a little warm'.

[Elheru Aran]

Can anyone think of an sf story or universe featuring a network of wormholes as a means of collecting and distributing power?

Power, no; travel, yes. Check out Stargate sometime-- hell, the idea's basically the raison d'etre for the entire series and its spinoff, Atlantis...

[Obloquium]

...Not really. Because defining a wormhole as 'Expensive' is akin to defining the centre of a fusion detonaton as 'a little warm'.

Even if wormholes are expensive, an open matter to say the least, why couldn't you use them as collectors and transfer lines (on top of other applications, like space highways?). And that doesn't answer my question. Can anyone point to any sf work that explores the use of wormholes to collect or generate and then distribute power?

[SirNitram]

...Not really. Because defining a wormhole as 'Expensive' is akin to defining the centre of a fusion detonaton as 'a little warm'.

Even if wormholes are expensive, an open matter to say the least, why couldn't you use them as collectors and transfer lines (on top of other applications, like space highways?). And that doesn't answer my question. Can anyone point to any sf work that explores the use of wormholes to collect or generate and then distribute power?

Expensive as in the energy required. To maintain such a network would be a ridiculous venture at best compared to generating power locally.

So no, no one appears to have explored the idea.

[Obloquium]

Expensive as in the energy required.

I understood the first time.

To maintain such a network would be a ridiculous venture at best compared to generating power locally.

Unless, of course, you have needs that exceed your capacity to generate locally (a la Death Star).

So no, no one appears to have explored the idea.

Mike Wong apparantly has. I'm wondering if the idea's been explored by professional sf writers.

[Zor]

The Hard *Snickers* OA verse has a network of wormholes for Transport.

Zor

[SirNitram]

Expensive as in the energy required.

I understood the first time.

To maintain such a network would be a ridiculous venture at best compared to generating power locally.

Unless, of course, you have needs that exceed your capacity to generate locally (a la Death Star).

I'm sorry, where does the Empire's energy needs exceed what it can produce in theatre? It produces fuel and moves it around.

So no, no one appears to have explored the idea.

Mike Wong apparantly has. I'm wondering if the idea's been explored by professional sf writers.

I'm afraid I would have to profess confusion at this bit about Mike shuffling power via wormhole.

[Obloquium]

I'm sorry, where does the Empire's energy needs exceed what it can produce in theatre? It produces fuel and moves it around.

See the discussion on hypermatter in the article. As for the Empire's energy needs, I imagine that's a discussion for Pure Star Wars or SVS; either way, it doesn't matter much as far as my question's concerned.

I'm afraid I would have to profess confusion at this bit about Mike shuffling power via wormhole.

"The Death Star requires no onboard fuel." This theory would require that it can somehow draw mass/energy from a source outside of itself, such as the theoretical vacuum zero-point energy of the universe, a source of mass/energy in hyperspace, or a distant source such as a quasar or black hole (presumably connected to the Death Star's hypermatter reactor through some kind of wormhole)....This brings us to the fourth theory: the theory that the Death Star is drawing energy from a source external to itself. This theory is certainly not without its flaws: the ZPE theory requires a high cosmological constant, which would be incompatible with the observed expansion rate of the universe. The "hyperspace tap" theory requires that hyperspace is filled with mass/energy, which may or may not be true. The wormhole theory requires that an artificial wormhole can be created which is anchored at one end and moved freely about at the other end, and this may not be strictly impossible but it definitely stretches credibility. However, the theory seems to suffer from fewer flaws than competing theories, and if true, it would explain the following: [t]he Death Star's vast energy production capabilities, [t]he Death Star's lack of fuel tanks, [t]he absence of side-effects from massive onboard mass/energy storage, such as gravitational effects on the Endor sanctuary moon.

[SirNitram]

I'm sorry, where does the Empire's energy needs exceed what it can produce in theatre? It produces fuel and moves it around.

See the discussion on hypermatter in the article. As for the Empire's energy needs, I imagine that's a discussion for Pure Star Wars or SVS; either way, it doesn't matter much as far as my question's concerned.

Pardon me for being unaware of a flawed, unlikely theory likely unupdated in years, as it's pretty clearly trounced by modern explanations of hypermatter.

[LadyTevar]

Can anyone think of an sf story or universe featuring a network of wormholes as a means of collecting and distributing power?

It's not SciFi, but I believe the Seventh Gate series by Wiese and Hickman had the worlds connected by wormholes.

[Obloquium]

Pardon me for being unaware of a flawed, unlikely theory likely unupdated in years, as it's pretty clearly trounced by modern explanations of hypermatter.

I don't care about hypermatter. If I did, I would've asked about it in the appropriate forum. I also didn't ask you to make uninformed claims about the mass-energy required to create wormholes. I asked whether there were any sf works exploring the idea of using wormholes as a (presumably interstellar) power grid.

[SirNitram]

Pardon me for being unaware of a flawed, unlikely theory likely unupdated in years, as it's pretty clearly trounced by modern explanations of hypermatter.

I don't care about hypermatter. If I did, I would've asked about it in the appropriate forum. I also didn't ask you to make uninformed claims about the mass-energy required to create wormholes. I asked whether there were any sf works exploring the idea of using wormholes as a (presumably interstellar) power grid.

ANd this has been repeatedly replied. Perhaps you need to work on that reading comprehension.

[Obloquium]

ANd this has been repeatedly replied.

Yes. You don't know. You've made that abundantly clear. You wanna move on now?

[XaLEv]

One thing I can think of is David Weber's Empire from the Ashes, where a wormhole-like mechanism (fold-space power transmitters) was used to transfer energy from a power plant on Earth's surface to weapon stations in orbit. Here's a description of how fold-space devices work:

"Supralight communication is maintained via the multi-dimensional communicator, commonly referred to as the 'hypercom,' a highly refined derivative of the much shorter-ranged 'fold-space' communicator used by Fleet personnel. Both combine elements of hyperspace and gravitonic technology to distort normal space and create a point-to-point congruence between distant foci, but in the case of the hypercom these distortions or 'folds' may span as many as several thousand light-years."

Not exactly a traditional wormhole, but it's close.


And another thing which occurs to me, it seems entirely possible that the wormholes in Stargate can be used to transfer power. Given that radio works through a gate, it seems that simple microwave power transmisison would also work.

For more exotic methods, I believe in the season two episode "A Matter of Time", Earth's stargate was powered by a source on the other end of an outgoing wormhole, even after power was cut on the origin side. Then, in the two part season six episode "Redemption", Anubis used an Ancient device which can transfer energy through a wormhole into a remote gate, which would build up and eventually over load it. In both cases a stargate could be used for that purpose if one had a way to extract that energy from the local gate after it's been transferred.

[Sriad]

"The Light of Other Days" by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke is about the development of cheap, small wormholes used initially as cameras and the complications that go along with absolute loss of privacy.

Eventually, they get large enough (a couple inches across IIRC) that they can be used for power by opening one end to a hot place (deep in the Earth) and pumping the heat through a lazy man's geothermal plant.

It's all on Earth, but that's the closest thing I can think of off hand, and it's a pretty good read too.

[fgalkin]

While, the Culture does not use wormholes, it does draw its power from an external source.

And the farcasters from the Hyperionverse are used for transportation.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[andrewgpaul]

Ring, by Stephen Baxter, uses a wormhole as a radiator, for a deep-diving solar probe. The material it spits out is so bright, it casts shadows on the solar surface

[Obloquium]

"The Light of Other Days" by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke is about the development of cheap, small wormholes used initially as cameras and the complications that go along with absolute loss of privacy.

I just picked it up. Thanks.

[Jon]

Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star utilizes wormholes in an interesting way, it's set about 400 years in the future and humans have colonised about 350 worlds all linked with artificial wormholes (FTL spaceships haven't been invented though). People travel through them by boarding train like vehicles, and heading into a normal 'tunnel' where the wormhole mouth/exit is located.

There is also talk about distributing power from one planet, to another (to power a shield covering a city in a later alien attack) and other instances of transmitting hugh volumes of energy to destroy targets near the exit of a wormhole