The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Junghalli »

GrayAnderson wrote:On the Moon Colonization: Yes, as long as you can get a portal reciever in the location you want to go. Put another way, I think you could send a one-way rocket trip into Mars Orbit, open two portals (one Earth Orbit to Hell and one Hell to Mars Orbit) and fire a Saturn through, and then use the Saturn to basically do a re-run of the Moon landing.
Don't forget the possibility of running fuel to the rocket through a portal. Fuel mass ratio is a huge problem for rocketry, and with this approach you could basically solve it.

With this approach we might actually be able to build a relativistic rocket with present tech. Have a rocket with a portal in it and pump fuel through. Keep it accelerating at 1 G for a year and you can get up to a high fraction of c. The easiest approach might be to use a nuclear thermal rocket and pump water from a convenient body of water in Hell through it. And if you can make portals from the other star system to Hell you've now got effective FTL (though it'd require an STL journey to get to the new planet).

Of course, this runs into the "relativity, casualty, FTL, pick any two" issue, so there may be casualty protection mechanisms that prevent portals being used in such a fashion.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by CaptainChewbacca »

Don't forget the possibility of running fuel to the rocket through a portal. Fuel mass ratio is a huge problem for rocketry, and with this approach you could basically solve it.
Portals seem to be relatively stationary. The only time we saw a moving aperture was over Detroit, where the naga lost focus and it started drifting randomly.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by GrayAnderson »

FireNexus wrote:
GrayAnderson wrote:I could see some countries with less-than-scrupulous human rights records shooting some portal-capable individuals off to Venus and having them punch through back to Hell in a big hurry once they get there to arrange this.
That wouldn't happen, unless they sent a Baldrick to do it. Nephilim are WAY too precious to waste like that.
And for some reason I suspect we might find one or two willing volunteers on that front all the same. As to the portal-capables, I honestly have no feel for the actual share of the population with enough angelic/demonic blood in them to fire those things off. I know it's pretty low, but .01% is still 500,000 (heck, .001% is 50,000).
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by erik_t »

CaptainChewbacca wrote:
Don't forget the possibility of running fuel to the rocket through a portal. Fuel mass ratio is a huge problem for rocketry, and with this approach you could basically solve it.
Portals seem to be relatively stationary. The only time we saw a moving aperture was over Detroit, where the naga lost focus and it started drifting randomly.
The universe has no preferred inertial reference frame, and indeed all portals seen have been stationary in noninertial frames. There's no reason to believe a portal cannot be used in this rocket-fuel-supply fashion, at least in principle.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Darth Wong »

There might, however, be an energy input required to cross the threshold. Without such a mechanism to compensate for portals at different energy states, we have the potential perpetual-motion machine.

Thinking on this more, let's imagine that when two portals are at roughly equal potential energy states, there is little resistance to passing through the portal. But if one portal is at an elevated potential energy state, then there might be a force gradient at the threshold (imagine it pushing back against you, like you're trying to force your way through an elastic membrane), and the area under the graph function of this force gradient with respect to linear distance would be equal to the difference in potential energy states.

This would neatly eliminate the possibility of using portals for perpetual motion machines. It also does not necessarily conflict with prior material, since we would not have observed this force gradient with portals which are at or near the same potential energy state. The sky-volcano portals could have been made using volcanoes with a potential energy state greater than that of the receiving portal (Detroit and Sheffield are not particularly high above sea level).
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by K. A. Pital »

I really can't believe Hugo Chavez isn't part of the Human Alliance. That's a ridiculous political stab. I would understand Kim and Myanmar who are autarkies with such an isolation level that even a fly can't get in or out, but Hugo of all people? Venezuela is a nation with free immigration/emigration, free travel, et cetera. When the entire Humanity is sucked up to fight demons, Venezuela can't be left behind.

Unless by that Stuart means the entire "religious belt" in Latin America, but that's clearly not the case as per the text. Which makes it even more ridiculous.

As for Cuba, Castro is an atheist and he'd really have no problem giving the old USSR-supplied weapons some fun time in Hell or against Yahweh and his messengers.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Surlethe »

Darth Wong wrote:The sky-volcano portals could have been made using volcanoes with a potential energy state greater than that of the receiving portal (Detroit and Sheffield are not particularly high above sea level).
Even then, you don't really need that the potential energy state of the input portals is greater than the receiving portals; lava is very heavy, so it has plenty of momentum to drain overcoming an energy gradient, and it might also have cooled off.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by erik_t »

Darth Wong wrote:There might, however, be an energy input required to cross the threshold. Without such a mechanism to compensate for portals at different energy states, we have the potential perpetual-motion machine.

Thinking on this more, let's imagine that when two portals are at roughly equal potential energy states, there is little resistance to passing through the portal. But if one portal is at an elevated potential energy state, then there might be a force gradient at the threshold (imagine it pushing back against you, like you're trying to force your way through an elastic membrane), and the area under the graph function of this force gradient with respect to linear distance would be equal to the difference in potential energy states.

This would neatly eliminate the possibility of using portals for perpetual motion machines. It also does not necessarily conflict with prior material, since we would not have observed this force gradient with portals which are at or near the same potential energy state. The sky-volcano portals could have been made using volcanoes with a potential energy state greater than that of the receiving portal (Detroit and Sheffield are not particularly high above sea level).
All this is quite true. However a lot of the time, the inaccessibility of space is a bigger problem than the energies involved; portals, in a sense, could be considered to be an ideal zero-mass zero-size space elevator. Sure, you have to dump energy in to get stuff higher in the planet's gravity well (and add KE), but you may have much more appealing methods to add said energy.

Never mind situations like space station resupply where you could be dropping (literally) shit down the gravity well and sending food up, for a net energy input approaching zero.

It's the sort of thing that makes the aerospace side of me get all hot and bothered.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Darth Wong »

Surlethe wrote:
Darth Wong wrote:The sky-volcano portals could have been made using volcanoes with a potential energy state greater than that of the receiving portal (Detroit and Sheffield are not particularly high above sea level).
Even then, you don't really need that the potential energy state of the input portals is greater than the receiving portals; lava is very heavy, so it has plenty of momentum to drain overcoming an energy gradient, and it might also have cooled off.
Sorry buddy, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to give you a Gibbs-slap for that one. If the object is heavier, then that only increases the energy required to reach a higher potential energy state. The idea that a heavier object can more easily "overcome the energy gradient" is so very, very wrong. You must wear the dunce cap of shame.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Surlethe »

Oh, goddamnit, I got mixed up. *puts dunce cap on* I was thinking of a potential difference, not a potential energy difference, though it is not clear to me on reflection that exonerates me at all.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Surlethe »

Simple exercise. Portal A opens at height h1, portal B opens at height h2, and they connect to each other. For ease of drawing (and WLOG), spse h1 < h2. Mass m wants to go from A to B; potential energy difference is mg(h2-h1). Resistance force at entrance is ... not well-defined? F = -dU/dh, but we're dealing with a discontinuous change in energy, so this doesn't work.

Heuristic: force required to traverse is related to the radius of the portal. F = k&Delta;U/r (k some constant) has the proper units, so it must be correct, right? (:wink:)

Anyway, for a sample mass to be able to get through, the kinetic energy has to be greater than the energy difference: [1/2]mv2 > mg(h2-h1), or v > sqrt[2g(h2-h1)] = sqrt[2&Delta;V], where V is the potential difference. So, unsurprisingly, transmission is related entirely to initial velocity (as it should) and not at all to mass.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Simon_Jester »

FireNexus wrote:
GrayAnderson wrote:I could see some countries with less-than-scrupulous human rights records shooting some portal-capable individuals off to Venus and having them punch through back to Hell in a big hurry once they get there to arrange this.
That wouldn't happen, unless they sent a Baldrick to do it. Nephilim are WAY too precious to waste like that.
Also, they'd have to survive a controlled landing on Venus. There are very few nations in the world that could plausibly make this work, and you'd know who had done it immediately.

"Hey, Bordania, why did you just launch a giant rocket to Venus?"

"Uh..."
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Kuroneko »

Surlethe wrote:Heuristic: force required to traverse is related to the radius of the portal. F = k&Delta;U/r (k some constant) has the proper units, so it must be correct, right? (:wink:)
The force should be some characteristic distance that the object travels--the portal throat. While that could coincide or scale with the radius of the portal, there is also no particular reason for it to do so. But if no restriction on k is implied, I suppose that's true enough, yes.

Another alternative is that the energy deficit is simple provided by the portal itself--i.e., the energy cost has already been paid on portal creation, and each portal would therefore have some limit on the amount of mass they could transport (perhaps extended with some maintenance [*]), unless arbitrarily negative energies are allowed. The ends would get heaver or lighter corresponding to the mass-equivalent of the potential energy difference. In GTR, wormholes do just that already, except also with mass. For example, if there are two asymptotically flat regions connected by a wormhole, then the total (ADM) four-momentum is conserved in both regions, meaning that an object traversing it would have to increase the mass of ingoing end and decrease that of the outgoing one.

[*] They might even be to some degree self-maintaining, by absorbing energy from the environment whenever it is available or emitting it as necessary.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Land Phish »

Baughn wrote: Hell is larger than Earth, but it isn't infinite. I had a thought, that someone who dies somewhere other than Earth might end up somewhere else entirely, or just go off to oblivion. It's worth a try! For science!
Damn that's a puzzler if I ever saw one. No aliens have been seen in Hell which provides evidence toward that hypothesis (assuming aliens exist), but then again, no animals have been found in Hell which makes it seem like a uniquely human quality to go to the afterlife, unless it has to do with the cognitive functions of an organism, which I suppose could be answered if someone were to build and then "kill" a sentient artificial intelligence but that's a whole other kettle of fish. And what about Heaven? people used to go there all the time until a thousand years ago. Maybe the angels know something about it.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by GrayAnderson »

Simon_Jester wrote:
FireNexus wrote:
GrayAnderson wrote:I could see some countries with less-than-scrupulous human rights records shooting some portal-capable individuals off to Venus and having them punch through back to Hell in a big hurry once they get there to arrange this.
That wouldn't happen, unless they sent a Baldrick to do it. Nephilim are WAY too precious to waste like that.
Also, they'd have to survive a controlled landing on Venus. There are very few nations in the world that could plausibly make this work, and you'd know who had done it immediately.

"Hey, Bordania, why did you just launch a giant rocket to Venus?"

"Uh..."
I didn't say it needed to be secret. It could even be quite public. However, given America's tendency to freak out every time we have a space accident, that kinda rules us out. On paper, Russia is a good candidate; in theory, China might also be able to pull something off as well, given some time, but you need a country that is willing to risk the mission bumbling.

The logic behind such a mission would be closely tied to any Mars colonization efforts. Venus has one thing that Mars lacks: Atmosphere. In the case of Venus, there's too much atmosphere, while Mars lacks more than a very thin one. Punching a portal into a lava tube or other isolated location in Hell from Venus and using a pre-arranged portal on Mars that can be observed from a distance (with some mechanism for setting up a "failsafe portal" to vent the Venus stuff into space if the Venus-to-Hell portal gets stuck open; an isolated part of the Moon might be a good candidate here, as might a generic location in space, while an evil part of me would suggest simply dumping all the unwanted atmospheric crap in Heaven and telling Yahweh to call the EPA if he has a problem).

Here's the thing: At the end of the day, Mars needs a substantial boost in both the sheer volume of its atmosphere and in the amount of CO2 present for us to be able to set up shop there in the long run. I'd also be tempted to mine water off of Europa if we need that, but that's actually a more complex undertaking (there were at least theoretical Venus mission plans prior to the LGM signal back in the 60s) given how far "out" it is. As absurd as it sounds, taking excess atmosphere from Venus and transferring it to Mars (and any other places we need a bunch of CO2) through Hell is probably only a $20 billion operation versus setting up any atmosphere factories on the planets in question.

One question does beg asking: There's a major problem with what counts as "stationary" in my mind. Earth is moving all the time, etc., but the portals "stay put" on Earth. What do portals lock into the presence of to stay put, and when would they "move" relative to such an object? (And does that question make any sense whatsoever?)

-------------------------------

As to Aliens in Hell, I'd offer up the possibility of a large number of pocket dimensions existing, not to mention the possibility of some sort of switching station "further on up" in the Hellmouth. It's sorta like a soda machine's coin slot: You put a quarter in, it has to roll all the way through to get to the quarter slot. You drop a dime through and it goes through the dime slot quickly enough. In that vein, you drop a human through after Yahweh shuts Heaven and he winds up in Hell. An alien might just have a different slot to slide into...or for that matter you might just have a shortage of fully sentient alien races (i.e. there's just that one other, etc.).
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by drakensis »

GrayAnderson wrote:If you get a big enough portal going there, you could (in theory) simply roll your Mars rockets through the portal and launch on the Moon without worrying about Earth's gravity...
Why would you care about the Earth's gravity if you had a portal in Earth orbit? Kick your rocket through the portal and it's in orbit and ready to go.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Baughn »

Land Phish wrote:
Baughn wrote: Hell is larger than Earth, but it isn't infinite. I had a thought, that someone who dies somewhere other than Earth might end up somewhere else entirely, or just go off to oblivion. It's worth a try! For science!
Damn that's a puzzler if I ever saw one. No aliens have been seen in Hell which provides evidence toward that hypothesis (assuming aliens exist), but then again, no animals have been found in Hell which makes it seem like a uniquely human quality to go to the afterlife, unless it has to do with the cognitive functions of an organism, which I suppose could be answered if someone were to build and then "kill" a sentient artificial intelligence but that's a whole other kettle of fish. And what about Heaven? people used to go there all the time until a thousand years ago. Maybe the angels know something about it.
It gets worse.

Ignoring AIs for the moment, consider this: What happened to people who went in for cryogenics? There are a few around.

What happens if we later manage to fix and revive their bodies?

They can't not be in hell, because that would require the laws of physics (or.. whatever is behind this) to somehow figure out whether or not they could potentially later be revived. Yeah, not gonna happen. And yet, some of them can be revived.

This universe might have "souls", but they're clearly not essential for cognitive function (witness, oh, any higher primate but the humans); more like a death-time snapshot. Nothing's preventing anyone from making multiple snapshots.


---

About the "relativity, FTL, casuality - pick any two" thing.. okay. First off, casuality is not on the chopping block here; just the notion of linear time. Add time-travel within a single timeline, and all you get is the option for the past to be determined by the future, as well as the other way around. The universe manages fine with the future being determined by the past; adding a second constraint does not make the math much harder.

Second, though, there's a perfectly general counterargument to time-travel in quantum mechanics: Virtual particles. They don't normally make much difference (except in casimir effects), but add a closed timelike loop (eg. any casuality-violating time-machine whatsoever), and virtual particles ought to find the loop and go through it a near-infinite number of times, reinforcing themselves until the whole thing just collapses.

In practice, that should happen just before it becomes a time-machine. So no big deal there.

As a bonus, this means that you can have FTL without time-travel: You just have to carefully arrange your portal network to avoid said time-travel, and if you get it wrong it'll blow up. Whee. There's a huge article on how traversable wormholes would work at http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Tech/Space-Ti ... holes.html; I believe it covers the situation in this story quite well.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Patience »

Don't forget the possibility of running fuel to the rocket through a portal. Fuel mass ratio is a huge problem for rocketry,
and with this approach you could basically solve it. and Portals seem to be relatively stationary. The only time we saw a moving aperture was over Detroit, where the naga lost focus and it started drifting randomly.
Actually from the inertial space point of view the hell mouth is in constant motion. The earth is spinning and in orbit around the sun which is moving through an expanding universe. Therefore portals are "wherever" and the logic for locating them has not yet been explained.
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Post by Baughn »

Most laws of physics have no absolute frame of reference; the oddly misnamed "relativity theory" was based on one quantity (i.e. the speed of light) unexpectedly being absolute. That is to say.. saying something like "constant motion" isn't merely inconvenient, it's meaningless.

The meaningful quantity is "constant relative motion", though in that case you have to ask, relative to what. Apparently not hell.

The portals are actually under constant acceleration, though, which is an absolute. If they weren't, they'd go flying off into space as the earth curves around the sun, never mind the rotation of the earth. I don't know how they're anchored; it couldn't be something as simple as sticking to a constant gravitational potential, since that'd allow them to move (approximately) laterally - they don't - and anyhow the earth's gravitational field is not actually a constant.

So, what's anchoring them..?

Well, let's see. First off, they are probably obeying gravity. That's a given with our laws of physics; you don't have a choice. Which is not to say that it has to be the case, but if it isn't you have to throw out.. some bits of relativity that are pretty much known to be wrong. Heh.

They aren't on a free-fall curve, though. They stick to where they were opened. Obvious experiment: Try opening a portal in a moving vehicle.

At a wild guess, then.. some theories of gravity have space being more than four-dimensional, with the extra dimensions small (wrapping around), but nevertheless there. This makes gravity fall off faster than inverse squared for whatever the size of those extra dimensions are, and then revert to the usual inverse square law.

Now, those extra dimensions are also a good place to put additional planes, a plane being a four-dimensional universe such as ours.. or hell.

The portals would be higher-dimensional structures allowing translation along those extra axises.

This configuration could allow gravity to act much more strongly on the portals than normal matter, the portals having extent in extra dimensions. However, only near-field gravity would be affected in this way, eg. from very close matter. The net effect could be to hook the portal to whatever matter is very close by (on the order of milli-to-micrometers). Unfortunately, that's mostly air, which moves quite a lot.

But wait! Such a one-to-one mapping between our world and hell would not allow for one other observed quantity of portals, namely that you can open a portal from any place in hell to any place in our world, or vice versa. To fix that, I hypothesize that the mapping is not one-to-one, but instead that both dimensions (or just one, doesn't really matter.. hm, hell would fit nicely) is crumpled up like an old wad of paper. I should probably mention fractals at this point; those are a good way to get a fitting structure with very small physical laws, and small laws = higher prior probability, thus more likely to be true.

So, in this case, the part of the portal entirely in our world would be affected only by nearby air; however, going very slightly along the higher-dimensional axis it's moving in would spread its gravitational shadow out to cover nearby matter such as, oh, the ground. Depending on the exact parameters here, that could work out to be just the top layer of soil, or kilometers of rock; it can't be very much more, because then the movement of the magma would start to matter.

This produces another interesting experiment. Are portals on water just as stationary?

Also, a portal opened in space would behave very differently. It'd probably follow your spaceship around, but not necessarily in a convenient manner; the edges could get slice-y. You'd have to find a way to contain it for them to be very useful in-flight, but you could always just turn off the engines for a while to refuel; this does mean that you'd have to carry a sensitive around, unless you can completely mechanize it - I see no problem with this, however.

All in all, plenty of room for tests. :D
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Post by Simon_Jester »

drakensis wrote:
GrayAnderson wrote:If you get a big enough portal going there, you could (in theory) simply roll your Mars rockets through the portal and launch on the Moon without worrying about Earth's gravity...
Why would you care about the Earth's gravity if you had a portal in Earth orbit? Kick your rocket through the portal and it's in orbit and ready to go.
Because it will fall?

Coming out of a portal in Earth orbit is just a scenic way to die unless you're traveling fast enough to stay in Earth orbit.
________
Patience wrote:Actually from the inertial space point of view the hell mouth is in constant motion. The earth is spinning and in orbit around the sun which is moving through an expanding universe. Therefore portals are "wherever" and the logic for locating them has not yet been explained.
On the other hand, the location of the portal is stable in some frame of reference other than its own- it doesn't dance around randomly. Its ability to stay "still" in non-inertial frames of reference (like that of the Earth's surface) is odd, of course, but it's fairly clear that portals "default" to remaining still in some stable, localized frame of reference.

I mean, I'd honestly be surprised to find out that demons even know the Earth orbits the Sun. How could they keep a portal steady on the Earth's surface if it wasn't natural for portals to do so?
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Junghalli »

Baughn wrote:This universe might have "souls", but they're clearly not essential for cognitive function (witness, oh, any higher primate but the humans); more like a death-time snapshot. Nothing's preventing anyone from making multiple snapshots.
This actually fits perfectly with my idea that the system that creates and sustains the undead must be artificial, and the Demons and Angels are just taking advantage of somebody else's infrastructure. It need not require any kind of mystical soul to work with, just straightforward mind uploading, with the upload being transferred to a new freshly created body.

About the question of aliens in Hell, didn't the Demons mention the existence of other worlds in Armageddon? There were some passages that hinted or outright stated that Earth was just one of a number of worlds they'd been to and exploited. At least some of these worlds might well be other planets in our universe.
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Post by Baughn »

Agreed. Everything about hell/heaven screams "artificial", not least the inhabitants, and if Yahweh isn't the cause - well, then something else must be.

I don't think we want to meet that "something", at least not before a technological singularity of our own. At best it's lovecraftian; more likely, we'd have a Babyeaters scenario on our hands.

("At best it's lovecraftian" meaning it'd mostly leave us alone through sheer not-caring-ness. The babyeaters wouldn't; they believe, quite reasonably, that it's the height of ethics to eat babies, and they'd be horrified at our non-babyeating ways. That link is highly recommended, by the way.)
GrayAnderson
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by GrayAnderson »

Simon_Jester wrote:
drakensis wrote:
GrayAnderson wrote:If you get a big enough portal going there, you could (in theory) simply roll your Mars rockets through the portal and launch on the Moon without worrying about Earth's gravity...
Why would you care about the Earth's gravity if you had a portal in Earth orbit? Kick your rocket through the portal and it's in orbit and ready to go.
Because it will fall?

Coming out of a portal in Earth orbit is just a scenic way to die unless you're traveling fast enough to stay in Earth orbit.
Because the rocket has to get into orbit to go through it? Here's the thing: You've got several stages to go through in the operation:
1) Interplanetary ship to Mars opens up a portal in Mars orbit. Portal is EO-Hell-MO.
2) Lander goes through from EO to MO. It lands on Mars, and opens up a surface portal. Portal link is now ES-Hell-MS.

Opening a portal in Earth Orbit means you don't have to spend the fuel getting something from Earth Orbit to another space destination, be it above Mars, Venus, or Alpha Centauri.

Theoretically, you could even do the Mars run with a bunch of standard shuttles; once you launch the first, open up a gate back to Hell. Launch a new shuttle through, to keep going for a week. It opens up a new gate back to Hell. Was, rinse, repeat, and hope you keep a good chart of where those portals are. Ironically, this version of the operation would likely be a bigger mess simply because you'd need about 100-200 launches and you'd have turnaround time problems that would shoot any timetable to Hell and back (no pun intended).

The best way to describe the effect of the portals is this: Wherever you can get a portal-generator, you can link humanity in instantly. I would actually highly advocate setting up a portal-based transmission network in this case (as you end-run around any lightspeed limitations)...though if anyone has ever read "The Old-Boy Club" by Michael Stackpole "The Old-Boy Network" by Timothy Zahn (yeah, I just mixed up two authors...), controlling an exclusive set of high-speed links through portals could certainly lead to some interesting stock manipulations.

As to time travel...I don't think that would functionally happen. I'd need someone with more familiarity with the subject to explain how you could get time travel with the portal system, seeing as all of the portals are at the same point in time.
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Baughn
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Baughn »

Well, the problem is that there is no such thing as "same point in time" across large amounts of space. See http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Tech/Space-Ti ... holes.html for details.

No, really. It is very interesting, and does explain how this would work.
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Re: The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Fifteen Up

Post by Junghalli »

Baughn wrote:Well, the problem is that there is no such thing as "same point in time" across large amounts of space. See http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Tech/Space-Ti ... holes.html for details.

No, really. It is very interesting, and does explain how this would work.
Copying and pasting the relevant section here for ease of viewing:
Traversable Wormholes: Time Travel wrote:Wormholes are constrained by relativity to travel at sublight speeds and are time-dilated as per normal. Clocks placed at the mouths of a wormhole always remain in synchronisation with each other. If I look through one end of a wormhole and compare the near clock with the far clock they always agree. Even if one end of the wormhole is travelling at relativistic speeds many light years away. Einstein says moving clocks run slow. There would appear to be a paradox here. We observe the two clocks keeping time with each other, yet relativity says the 'distant', travelling clock is running slowly. How do we reconcile this? Only by concluding that the distant clock has been displaced in space and time. If a wormhole enables someone travel from Alpha Centauri 2000 to Sol 1993 and vice versa, then no paradox because they can't travel back to Alpha Centauri (through conventional space) and arrive before they left (to cause a paradox).

Problems begin when the distant wormhole end turns about and returns home. According to the twin paradox the traveller returns aged less than the stay-at-home twin (their clocks are no longer in step). Travelling through the wormhole from the stay-at-home end to the go- away-and-come-back end transports you forward in time. Travelling in the reverse direction transports you back in time. Wormholes allow time travel. This conclusion was realised soon after the first articles on traversable wormholes were published. Depending on your view of the plausibility of time travel this is either, if you believe time travel possible, very exciting or, if you scoff at time travel, proof that traversable wormhole can't exist. No general consensus emerged in the pages of various physics journals as the subject was batted back and forth. Elaborate and very interesting papers (by Thorne's group [7] and others) reconciled time travel with quantum theory, whilst others (like Hawking ) proposed a Chronological Protection Conjecture, CPC, which says the Universe Shalt Not Allow Time Travel.

One of the time travel sceptics was Matt Visser. Early in 1993 he showed that wormholes do not enable time travel [2], by proposing physical mechanisms that enforce CPC. Visser showed, in a peer reviewed article, the mouths of a wormhole with an induced clock difference could not be brought close enough together to enable a traveller to attempt violation of causality. Quantum field and gravitational effects build up as the two ends of a wormhole approach the critical point and either collapse the wormhole or induce a mutual repulsion. Visser's work is not complete but it seems swarms of virtual particles disrupt the region around a time machine just before it would otherwise become operational.

The virtual particles around a nearly chronologically violating region are able form closed spacelike (superluminal) loops and, via Heisenberg, to borrow energy off themselves, becoming more virulent than usual. Traversable wormholes are closed, or pinched off, by the energy of the virtual particles that flow through them as they approach being time machines which prevents the more dangerous closed timelike loops (which may cause paradoxes). For the purposes of this article I'll adopt Visser's conclusion that the CPC mechanism is generic and blocks all forms of time travel via wormholes, but permits the operation of wormholes for the purpose of FTL travel.
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