Wormholes

Summary:

A few questions about one of the most important SA technologies

Wormholes

Tantavalist 13 Sep 2013 22:16

While thinking about my homebrew setting for SA2, I came up with a questions about Wormholes. These are things I could have easily come up with my own answers for, but, Colin is a physicist, and says he makes things as close to hard science as possible with the techs he imagines. So I thought, why not ask them here?

The first question would be- what does a Worhole look like? This is actually pretty important, since in most SA settings the PCs will be seeing a lot of them and the players aren't likely to know and will probably ask. Wormholes will be perfectly spherical, but beyond that- how do they appear?

A lot of people seem to picture some sort of energy halo or discharge, which doesn't seem to work for me. Given the energy requirements of generating a wormhole, if some of that energy did "bleed through" into the area around an opening then even the tiniest fraction would be lethal to anyone nearby. I tend to picture a distortion, since space-time is being twisted around the opening- but maybe it's actually a perfect mirror, reflecting anything. Or some combination of both, a mirror-like hoop with heat-haze surrounding it?

This leads to another question- what happens if you don't approach a Wormhole from the front? What does a Wormhole look like viewed from behind, that is, from the place the Wormhole obscures from view if you're walking into it? I'd say that it's a solid wall of whatever the edges of the Wormhole look like. And it you touch the edge- some sci-fi settings would say that it shear through anything, but I suspect it'll just deflect (or more accurately bend away from it) anything that touches it.

And what is a Wormhole like to the other senses? Does the generation produce a sound or other noticeable effect? Most importantly, can people detect a nearby wormhole with mundane senses rather than exotic tech ("around the corner out of sight, you hear the unmistakable sound of a wormhole opening…")?

If nothing else, there's always going to be a constant wind through a wormhole, ranging from a light breeze to near-gale. It's very unlikely that both ends will have the exact same air pressure and temperature, after all. Unless the wormhole is opening from a facility that makes a point of adjusting the environment in the departure room to what it thinks the destination will be like, of course.

Well, that's round one. Anyone else have any wormhole queries they'd like to add?

Re: Wormholes

Colin_Fredericks 15 Sep 2013 13:51

All these are just what I use in my personal games. I'm not sure anyone in the scientific community has done any modeling of what wormholes might look like.

I do imagine wormholes as a spherically symmetric phenomenon, at least in the usual 3 dimensions. There is no "viewed from behind", and it's just as valid to walk in one side as it is to walk in the other.

They leak energy in a few ways. They're loud (if you open them in an atmosphere), with more sound at the low end. It's fairly distinctive. They throw off gravity waves, which is how most people notice them. There are ripples and haze (analog static, I guess) that make it difficult to see from one end to the other, though sophisticated optics can compensate for that. The outer edges will look whiter (more haze/fog) from whatever angle you view from. The more fancy shit you're trying to do with the wormhole (pressure equalization and such) the worse the distortion will be.

The energy leakage is very small compared to the amount of energy it takes to open the wormhole, but you can still pick up the gravity waves from across the solar system (for ship-sized wormholes) or across the planet (for person-sized ones). The noise is comparable to a rock concert.

Re: Wormholes

Tantavalist 11 Oct 2013 14:07

Another issue regarding Wormholes that occurs to me is the time-travel aspect. Most games and settings will ignore this, but for the benefit of the ones which won't, some clarification might be in order.

In the SA rough draft, it's mentioned that Wormholes could be used to travel through time, but not further back than the point the Wormhole was created.

Considering this, I've interpreted this to mean the point at which the Wormhole was opened. So, for example, if a Worhole is created and held open for five hours, someone who passed through it could appear on the other side at the exact point it was opened, travelling back five hours by doing this. Likewise, someone who passed through the moment the Wormhole was created could appear five hours later, just before the Wormhole closed. (Thinking about it, this means that Wormholes could in fact create what, from a human point of view, is effectively Temporal Stasis by sending an object to the final point of the Wormhole then closing the Wormhole to recover it).

What is not, from this model, a possibility is to just open a Wormhole now and have it emerge five hours in the past.

This means that time travel is possible, but only if you can find a Wormhole that has been constantly open since the point in time that you want to travel to. Possibly there might be naturally occurring Wormholes, on a microscopic scale, which if discovered could be enlarged and used to travel back in time- but, that would be for the individual settings to determine.

Does it sound like I've understood this aspect of Wormholes correctly?

Re: Wormholes

Colin_Fredericks 11 Oct 2013 14:44

It sounds like you have it about right. I'm not sure why you would need to close the wormhole to recover the object, though. The time difference is built up by moving one end of the wormhole at relativistic speeds with respect to the other; you can just chuck the object into one end and pick it up at the other a certain amount of time later, and keep the wormhole around (if you've got the power for it) to use it again.

The time-travel aspect is definitely a "your can of worms" item. GMs who want to use them for that will have to do some research. Kip Thorne is still a good reference.

Re: Wormholes

Tantavalist 13 Oct 2013 14:27

So, the temporal emergence point isn't something that can be controlled, but something that is fixed based on the relative times of the wormholes? I'd been working on the assumption that you could simply emerge at any time during the wormhole's existence. If this isn't the case, wormhole time travel already has a big limiter built in.

When it comes to the problems time travel can cause, things only really start to fall apart when the PCs themselves get unrestricted access to it. In the Patent Office setting, temporal computation effectively introduces many of the problems physical time travel would cause. This is kept in balance by the fact that the PCs themselves never have direct access to it. NPCs do, and they control when and if the PCs can use the potentially paradox-causing/game-wrecking data. Allowing time travel through wormholes is the same- it can exist in the background, as long as player access is restricted.

Looking over the tech level descriptions gives a simple way to do this- opening a wormhole requires vast amounts of energy. PCs can get the ability to do this, but it exhausts their power reserves. In order for wormhole time travel to be used to it's full potential, a wormhole must be kept open for a very long period of time. Clearly, to generate power faster than the wormhole uses it will require significant power generation facilities- in other words, a dedicated facility with at least some level of the Infrastructure descriptor.

Such a thing isn't something the PCs are likely to have when the need it. So, using this means you can have time-travel plots be part of the background without worrying that the PCs will use it to screw things up.

Oh, and as for why the wormhole would need to be shut off to get the object in stasis back- my idea was, the object would be sent to the temporal end point of the wormhole. Therefore, the object would emerge just prior to the wormhole being switched off. If you didn't know how long the object needed to be outside time for, this would be the way to do it. Send it to the end point, then turn the wormhole off when you want it back.

Re: Wormholes

Colin_Fredericks 15 Oct 2013 13:04

Edit: Totally reversed "upstream" and "downstream" here. Derp. Fixed now. Analogy: If time is a river, the Big Bang is the spring, and is as far "upstream" as you can get.

Ah, ok. The end that you're maintaining the wormhole from (assuming remote wormholes where you can do it from just one end) will be the one that is farther downstream in time. The one that got moved will be farther upstream - toss things into the uptream end and they come out the downstream end in the future. If you close the wormhole via stopping the energy feed to the downstream end, the upstream end already closed a while ago. Objects that are still in transit would probably get destroyed.

Last edited on 17 Oct 2013 21:55 by Colin_Fredericks Show more

Re: Wormholes

David McK-B 17 Oct 2013 17:44

Wait, I'm a little confused. (But then again, time travel is involved. That's to be expected, right?)

Consider this example:

Alex is on spaceship X, Bob is on spaceship Y, and Clark is on planet Z.

There's a continuous wormhole from spaceship X to spaceship Y.

From Clark's perspective, Bob flies his ship around the planet at relativistic speeds for a while, while Alex keeps her ship at sub-relativistic speeds from Clark's perspective.

Then Clark goes to sleep.

The star abruptly goes supernova, destroying planet Z and killing Clark.

Which ship has more time to escape? (or, alternatively, had)

EDIT: Assume each of them saw it coming at least a moment before, and if appropriate sent a message through and {closed the wormhole/had the wormhole closed}.

Last edited on 17 Oct 2013 17:48 by David McK-B Show more

Re: Wormholes

Colin_Fredericks 17 Oct 2013 21:53

Crud, I think I reversed "downstream" and "upstream" in the last example. Ok. Will attempt to clarify here.

Bob's end of the wormhole has undergone time dilation. Fewer seconds have passed for it than for Alex's end. If Alex tosses something into the wormhole, it traverses the wormhole's inner space very quickly and comes out in her past.

(All sorts of Twin Paradox stuff can be brought up here, but the Twin Paradox is not really a paradox, so we'll skip all that. Short version: we can basically treat Alex's frame as the "correct" frame.)

If Alex sends a message when the supernova goes off, Bob will receive that before she sends it, and have more time to react.

Also, if Bob isn't a jerk, he could pick up the damn phone and tell her about it. Don't be a jerk, Bob. Alice might also notice that Bob's end of the wormhole suspiciously closes with a burst of neutrinos and gamma particles, but that's only if her end is destroyed in the supernova.