Technological applications of light only wormholes
For this question I'm assuming a utterly infeasible technological breakthrough suddenly makes wormholes technology possible. However there is a major catch, the 2D "windows" as they're called don't allow through matter or gravitational pull. The "windows" can be opened for about a half a million USD. Once opened these portals stay open indefinitely unless closed.
Opening a portal requires a large amount of energy, and the use of expensive and bulky machines on one end of the wormhole, with only a small machine and energy on par with a car battery required on the other end. The portals are flat windows that look like portals, however were you to walk up to one you would pass through it unaffected. The portals size can be as small as a millimeter or as large as 2,600 meters, any larger would require using multiple portal machines and linking them together. A portal can have any shape with the smallest definition being a millimeter, however portals are totally flat. Each side of the flat portal corresponds to a side of the other end of the portal. Each of the two connected portals must be the exact same shape and size.
Portals will continue moving as the machine that created them was, at the moment it created the portal, other than controlling its initial motion you can't move portals except as detailed below. This means if the machine was orbiting the earth the portal will continue this motion, even though it isn't itself a object and has no mass. Portals also continue accelerating or decelerating as the machine was when it created it, however while portals can continue accelerating indefinitely they will slow acceleration such that they approach, but never reach the speed of light.
A portal on earth will not slowly drift, since slight changes in planetary motion such as the lengthening of days is effectively counted as deceleration thus the portal undergoes the same slowing, this only holds true for motions that continue at the same rate of acceleration/deceleration as when the portal was created. The end of the portal which requires the expensive machinery to create can be kept linked to the machines so that it moves with them, however this means you can't use those machines to make further portals.
Weapon note: To prevent the scenario of potential apocalyptic destruction, due to someone launching a portal through the sun. I have decided that a wormhole will collapse if more than about the equivalent of a kiloton of TNT worth of energy tries to pass through it in a second, though most energy that can pass through it in a second is equivalent to a ton of tnt. Since the portal only allows through at most a ton of tnt, any additional energy is reflected back when it hits the portal. This is still a lot of energy so it still has a lot of weapon potential. Keep in mind, as far as I know all energy would be in the form of photons.
TLDR: It's a portal that only lets light through.Well actually other details of it are more complicated, so read the whole question before answering.
What uses would be implemented for such a technology assuming it essentially appeared in our world overnight?
The most obvious thing I can think of using it for is as a source of near infinite energy, you could get one end of the portal in an orbit much closer to the sun and use the energy to boil massive amounts of water (also may be useful for desalinization). Using it to allow faster than light communication is an obvious application as well (though given our current technology that's not super useful).
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1 answer
Colonization of other moons and planets
You could open up portals around a bunch of bodies in our solar system to increase insolation and make teraforming more viable.
Titan would be a real possibility for teraforming, with a thick atmosphere, water, etc. The problem is that it is really really cold.
It's 72 kelvin on Titan, which is about the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
Throw a few portals around it and you could raise the temperature to a habitable level.
Mars could benefit from more light, since it has about 44% of the Earth's solar constant. This would make growing things easier, and could restart the water cycle.
FTL
Also, since it allows photons, that means that radio waves will go through. So communication with the rovers on Mars or space probes gets a lot faster.
Exploration
The fact that they keep accelerating up to lightspeed is also useful, in that you could create one that is heading toward another star, and one end you look through here on Earth, and it becomes something like an infinite zoom telescope. You'd want to have some high speed cameras on it, as it would pass by the intended star pretty fast.
Edit:
Energy Collection As user867 pointed out, with enough of these you could make a Dyson Swarm/Dyson Bubble for energy collection.
- Launch a portal generator into a solar orbit.
It doesn't have to be that close of an orbit either. The Dyson Sphere concept uses a orbital distance of 1 AU (the same distance as Earth orbits). These portals could be a lot closer, maybe inside the orbit of Venus, but you wouldn't need to be inside the orbit of Mercury. It would probably take some computer simulation to decide on the best orbital distance to portal size to maximize the collection while staying below the shutdown point. - Create a small portal to be used for energy transfer through far field wireless power transmission (microwave or laser perhaps).
- Beam enough power to create a large portal to start harvesting the suns energy, which could used for solar power (it could even work at night!), thermal to drive a normal steam dynamo plant, or both.
- Take the power generated and beam it to the generator to create another portal, increasing the amount of power generated.
- Repeat until there are enough portals to enclose the sun. It could be helpful to avoid putting portals in the plane of the ecliptic so that earth and the other planets still get the same amount of light.
Some portals might get knocked out if they are overloaded by solar flares, but with several portal generators working to make new portals this would be a minor problem. At some point the amount of energy collected basically lets you create portals for almost nothing.
Communication
\$500,000 is a little high for a radio mast, but there are a few things that might make it worth the cost (if the cost hasn't been driven down by the previous point).
Towers used for television, cell phones, radio, and other communication can cost \$200,000 - \$300,000 to put up, plus the cost of land (expensive in cities) and running hard lines (expensive in rural areas).
By using portals, you can essentially put a transmitter in any location at any altitude, while all the hardware is in an easily accessible, easy to maintain location on the ground.
Google has been playing around with using balloons as wifi transmitters, and others have been looking into satellites as a way to have global wifi internet access. A portal is cheaper than a satellite, and is easier to maintain and upgrade, since all the hardware is on the ground still.
Also, as Jan Dvorak pointed out, for replacing the normal backbone infrastructure, portals would be way cheaper than undersea cables, and you would never need to worry about them being cut.
As the technology matures and portals get cheaper and cheaper, at some point you'll see an ISP offering PTTH (portal to the home) internet instead of fiber.
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