The Archangel Syndrome v1/v2 (Page 10 of 25)

Quasi-science question. My starlanes Galactipedia writeup says there is a web of naturally occurring wormholes that pervade the galaxy. That's the huge handwavy part of how ships are able to travel from system to nearby system in mere minutes. However, in order to make the concept work for the story, I stated that the mouths of wormholes are naturally closed and are opened/closed by jump gates at either end of a wormhole. I wrote it that way to explain why we haven't found such wormholes in our solar system. Basically, they're closed and the jump gate shrinks to a ten meter wide ring when closed. The rings are made of many interconnected metal pieces that spread out when a ship with a stardrive approaches, essentially "pulling" the mouth of the wormhole open.

Question: Does the idea of wormholes with closed mouths even make sense? Can a wormhole exist when it's mouths are closed? If not, then I could replace wormholes with some other handwavy concept that allows for a web of natural tunnels that bypass spacetime. Since the latter tunnels are total hocus pocus, I would be free to say they are naturally closed and require a jump gate to open/close them.

Thanks
Dirk

The wormhole needs to be naturally closed so that we don't discover it for hundreds more years. If it's anything like the opening at Deep Space 9, we would almost certainly detect it before then. The fact that it's closed is part of my initial handwaving, but that's not possible if wormholes with closed mouths can't exist. I've looked at the pictures, too, which is why the question came to mind.

I changed my answer above and you did not get the change before you answered. I also added another thought and that disappeared. Hmm. I wonder what happened. I wrote that if you create this from a energy point of view then it takes more energy to jump across the galaxy than to jump 1 meter. That is why you need these to be near stars or black holes.

IP is a bit spooky from a money point of view.

Wormholes are 'common' theoretical things. Can't we use them without fear of lawsuits?

How about a worm-corkscrew? Or a worm-twister? It twists down to a point and then twists back up again - The outer envelope is the same as a wormhole.

I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore, Joseph.

There was once a computer called the Gateway 2000. Now it's called Gateway.
Starlane, Farlane, Galane, Galaxway, Gaxway, Faraway, Time Dimension (TimDim), Time and Dimension Jump, TADJump

I'm tired so my current favorite one is the Hinklee Hole or H2 for short.

https://phys.org/news/2022-12-physicist … uture.html

At this point, you can imagine what you want.

Are your unopened wormholes fixed, or do they move?  Relative to what?

Thanks for the link, njc. Having thought about this this afternoon, I decided to drop having countless natural wormholes as part of the story. The jump gates are still included, but they allow for instantaneous travel between closely spaced star systems where jump gates (called Hinklee Leaps) exist. Somehow, the N=j*c^2 equation can be used to solve for the location of leap points in any star system. Hinklee Leaps only exist/work at leap points. Different leap points take you to different nearby systems as long as there are jump gates at the leap points.

Wormholes need not be visible (à la DS9). They could be simply invisible and negligible energy. Our telescopes would have trouble spotting one; we'd have a hard time quantifying it if we did. (For example https://www.space.com/11471-weird-pione … posed.html)

Ten metres is huuuuge given scientists are arguing about a rock the size of a football orbiting Jupiter (Is it a moon? What's the minimum size of a moon?)

Popular? No, not off the top of my head. But a "tire" needn't have an original / unique name if it's just a tire.

As with time travel, the more moving science-parts you add, the more it detracts from the character arcs. The more it draws attention, and the more problems arise which need to be patched requiring more moving parts. A vicious cycle. I recommend to parcel the handwavium into a small package and let it sit slightly out of the spotlight (I'm thinking about Apollo's missing scene, here).

I'm actually trying to simplify things. I realized a web of natural wormholes didn't add anything above and beyond instantaneous jump gates. The only potential advantage was that no one has ever used a massive web of natural wormholes as an FTL travel solution. Possibly because it's so outlandish. :-)

Instantaneous jump gates for ships aren't that common as an FTL solution as far as I know. I skimmed through Wikipedia articles about hyperspace and didn't see anything. The closest, popular version of jump gates was in Babylon 5, but those merely opened a door into hyperspace. I hope to bypass that entirely with a network of gates that link closely spaced star systems. I do need > 0 travel time from Earth to New Bethlehem, but that's already part of the jump gate solution since you have to travel at sublight speed as you travel in-system from gate to gate as part of star hopping.

The only outstanding issue as far as I can tell is how to integrate the N=jc^2 equation into the network of jump gates. Off the top of my head, the equation is used to predict the location of jump points , which is where Hinklee found jump gates created by the ancient gate creators that fanned out throughout the galaxy building the network. It'll be a very similar writeup to the one I just did involving wormholes, only simpler.

I'm wondering if I should rename gateways to something a little more creative. I had called them Leaps (short for Leap-of-Faith or Hinklee Leap), but Leap is also a verb, so it didn't read right. My thesaurus yields zilch in the way of interesting words that haven't been used before, probably many times. I'd prefer to avoid "jumping" terminology if I can. Transporting is a possibility, but still rather derivative.

Star Portal, portal for short, aka a Hinklee Leap