Consequences of Portal-Travel
I'm throwing around a rough concept in my head and wonder which effect it would have on the present world. How would the world as we know it change if this technology were invented (and nothing else changed)?
Imagine that we discover a way to build portals through space that connect distance points in space, similar to Stargate or many others. Imagine that in this case, a membrane appears between two otherwise remote locations. It has a slight outwards pressure, so you need to apply some force to cross the barrier (no such thing as being sucked in, and no interchange of air, sound, temperature, etc.)
I'm wondering about details of this. The technology connects two points in space, as if the distance between them were zero. Obviously, they would have to be defined relative to each other (space has no absolute dimensions). Would they vibrate or shift in relation to each other and by how much? Which effect would an instant transition to a different place on the surface of earth have? Air pressure differences are an obvious issue, but what about rotation? Would you really arrive head-down, spinning rapidly, as naive assumption leads me to believe? What else could go wrong, especially to living beings? Would there be serious damage if, for example, gravity goes into different directions in different parts of your body for the short time of passing through the portal?
Clarifications:
- The portals are intended to only connect space. No matter disassembly, teleportation, re-arrangement of wave functions or something. They are really just portals, nothing more fancy.
- My intended story is earth-today-as-we-know-it-plus-portals - so interstellar travel is not my concern. Any "relative to" things would be relative to earth or to one of the portals.
- Effects like energy conservation or energy generation through potential energy are discussed at length in other questions and are likewise not my concern.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/61429. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
One concept that comes up a lot in this sort of world (think Portal, Neal Asher's Polity series or Niven's Ringworld etc) is momentum.
Portal states, "Speedy thing goes in. Speedy thing comes out," allowing interesting effects as momentum is conserved relative to the plane of the portal.
In the Polity series, momentum energies are dissipated in the arrival Runcible, and a failure here tends to equal R.U.D.
And in Ringworld, plates couldn't be placed too far apart round the ringworld, or the momentum differences would kill you. Even minor differences required energy sinks to cool.
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