The Wormhole Hall of Shame | Hacker News Reader

The Wormhole Hall of Shame

rznicolet.com

42 pointsrznicolet20 comments

In which I expound on a very petty complaint about fictional wormholes.

We never see the wormhole in Stargate, at least under SG1 canon. It's microscopic and simply used for transporting a matter stream. The ring field is a matter destabalizer and recombinator, pretty much the same thing as Star Trek transporters. Thats why radio waves can move two-way but matter is one-way.

Now if you're using Movie canon, yeah, it's broke.

Also, Marvel? Those aren't wormholes, they're magic portals.

Isn't the whole CG effect of flying through a magical tube seeing the wormhole?

Although the explanation of how it all works is rather inconsistent in Stargate. Initially, gate travel was something that people experienced and it was only later changed to being dematerialised.

I don’t think so, or maybe it was… IDK anymore. Now I’ll have to go rewatch it.

It definitely is explained as described above. The gate itself, the “event horizon” is all part of the apparatus for accessing the wormhole, not the wormhole itself. I forget the episode, but there is one where something happens due to the fact that they recreated/reverse engineered the “brains” of the device with human design (missing some key failsafes) and some of them get stuck in the “buffer” (dematerialized state) until it’s figured out how to reconstitute them.

Yeah, that's right and I believe that was the episode that introduced McKay. I've been binging Stargate over the last month or so, so it's pretty fresh.

There is a whole lot of technical mumbo-jumbo in the Fandom Wiki: https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Stargate#Technical_specific...

It seems that Stargates are not only responsible for forming and maintaining wormholes (but only for 38 seconds and only one-directional!) but also the same concept as Star Trek transporters, as far as deconstructing everything to sub-atomic levels, "pattern buffers" to store them all, and reconstituting them on the other side.

Stargate SG-1 and its precursor film were interesting distractions for me, but the lore was too complex and it all just relied so, so heavily on that Stargate network and the USA being in control of a central one.

I am currently rewatching Babylon 5 as it drops on YouTube for free, and I enjoy the jump gates and hyperspace as a highly-simplified plot device for how they can ship stuff, and transport people, around the solar system and around the galaxy. Also, Babylon 5 retains a Star Wars-inspired dichotomy of capital ships that can form own jump points, vs. support vessels that can't.

Interestingly, the two contemporary series shared the lore of being "found technology" created by ancient races who ascended long ago.

Scott Manley has a couple of nice videos about wormholes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7e-1bRpweo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVO8nvb1o2w

The second video is about how the first video was made.

Philomena Cunk also discusses wormholes with Prof.Brian Cox, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPX0v9NzzrM.

> Schlock Mercenary [...] Gold star, A+, would archive binge again.

Seconded, and don't worry, the initial art gets a lot better over the decades. :)

If you’re inclined to add any more, consider Outer Wilds! “Black holes technology” is a major plot point and shows up as a neat gameplay mechanic in a couple places.

PSA: This was posted 4 days ago and seems to have been given a "second chance", so take all the HN timestamps with a grain of salt.

Yeah, but comments from two months ago?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793637

I won't pretend to understand the code involved, I just know it happens occasionally on HN, and that my own comment is being shown as 3-days-younger than it actually is.

Doctor Who's Time Vortex is not a wormhole...

Nothing requires the wormhole "surface" to be a sphere, just like nothing requires the wormhole in the 2D analogy to be a circular hole. If you make it a sphere with one flat side, travelers won't have to traverse curved space (with the attendant weird tidal/gravitational effects).

Why do bubbles naturally always end up as spheres instead of cubes or some other shape? Even though wormholes as discussed aren't real, geometric and physical optimizations of energy are going to push for a 'natural' shape so long as there isn't concerted effort and energy to retain an unnatural, unoptimized shape.

Regarding the curved space, I think you bring an interesting observation. Instead of a flat sided sphere, it's still a sphere, but the curve that connects the two spaces has Radius = 0 (the spaces are touching, no tunnel needed), so there wouldn't be any distorted curved space to traverse.

However, to conserve matter, this idea requires the hole to be infinitesimally small (or tiny with a negligible tunnel), which explains why we don't see wormholes in real life

How does a 2D creature see curved space? https://youtu.be/9JbYDDjhnx4

Unsure where to safely step forward. The bending boundary bits look terrifying.

Yeah, I expect the tidal forces and whatnot are, shall we say, not negligible in practice.

I thought stargates were explicitly not wormholes. For one thing, they're one-way.

Yeah, even if a wormhole is involved, the "surface" is some local magic machinery designed to make the trip survivable and ensure you pop out in the right shape on the other side.

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