In Portal, using the portal gun to get to the moon is the obvious space travel usage, but I think people are overlooking how it’d let you trivially break the rocket equation.

Hell, you could build a >1g torchship using nothing but the ocean.

    • Foone🏳️‍⚧️@digipres.clubOP
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      8 months ago

      There’s also the gravity interaction: an infinitely falling object that never reaches the bigger body is also accelerating the bigger body.

      Your forever falling object is shoving the earth upward, very slowly. That could matter in the long enough term… But it seems kinda meaningless compared to the other ways you could use a portal.

      Still, might be handy if you need to adjust the orbit of a planet and are willing to wait.

      • Damon L. Wakes@mastodon.sdf.org
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        8 months ago

        @foone@digipres.club Now this is bugging me too. If you actually wanted to loop a falling object between two portals and forget about it, would it have to be at one of the Earth’s poles? I feel as though otherwise the object would start to drift out from between the two portals due to the Coriolis effect (ignoring the fact that an object left falling like this at the equator would constantly be cancelling out whatever effect it produced 12 hours previously).

      • Coffeemancer Vanvidum@tiggi.es
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        8 months ago

        @foone@digipres.club One wonders what kinds of electromagnetic interaction tricks you can do with portal technology as well. At the very least, you can build a computer that’s physically enormous while being linked together through portals as if it’s microscopically adjacent.

          • Foone🏳️‍⚧️@digipres.clubOP
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            8 months ago

            The lab boys tell me that if you dump enough iron into a star, it’ll turn off. Well, we don’t have that much iron on hand, but what if it’s moving at 99% the speed of light?
            They told me that wouldn’t help, but I said pack your bags: We’re doing it anyway

            • Foone🏳️‍⚧️@digipres.clubOP
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              8 months ago

              Portal 2 does establish that the portal-placing shot moves at the speed of light, but that just raises the question of how fast you move through the portals themselves.

              It basically can’t be slower than light, or you’d chop yourself in half if you moved halfway into one and then backed out.

              So it has to be lightspeed: which means, if relativity is still correct, that it’s also a time machine.

              • Jay Blanc@blan.cc
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                8 months ago

                @foone@digipres.club There’s a Cave Jonson voice line that mentions the possibility that testing the ASHPoD may involve “trace amount of time travel”.

                • Foone🏳️‍⚧️@digipres.clubOP
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                  8 months ago

                  Anyway once you’re flying around the universe with your FTL portal-rockets the next question is what happens if the two ends of a portal are moving at different speeds through time. What if you drop one end into a black hole?

                  • Webster Leone@meemu.org
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                    8 months ago

                    @foone@digipres.club My first thought was the Stargate thing where the effects go through the portal, but they didn’t have the other in a black hole, just near it.

                    Would that make the portal one-way? Would it allow things to escape the event horizon? Would a portal even be able to go into one? What makes a surface capable of holding a portal? Would those properties cease in a black hole? Interesting questions.

                  • Foone🏳️‍⚧️@digipres.clubOP
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                    8 months ago

                    And what if you put one end on an enemy planet and the other end in low orbit around Betelgeuse when it finally goes supernova?

                    How many gamma rays will come through a hole in space about a meter across?

              • Amikke@qoto.org
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                8 months ago

                @foone@digipres.club the portals connect space, you don’t move through them at the speed of light, you move through them at whatever speed you move in the space around them since they’re no different than any other plane cut through it.

              • Gorro_Rojo@qoto.org
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                8 months ago

                @foone@digipres.club i think 1) what travels at the speed of light is the shot from the portal gun to the surface

                1. there isn’t a delay from going in one portal abd going out the other, it being a pseudo-wormhole kind of situation
            • EddiKat@meow.social
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              8 months ago

              @foone@digipres.club @garrwolfdog@yiff.life Without even seeing your first toot, I read this in Cave Johnson’s voice. Bravo, good job.

            • Alisdair Calder McGregor@topspicy.social
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              8 months ago

              @foone@digipres.club don’t forget as well that the portal transit is instantaneous. Never mind the other implications, that alone breaks the universe in a number of exciting ways

            • Dot@chitter.xyz
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              8 months ago

              @foone@digipres.club You just so happened to catch me while I had enough gunk in my throat to have a proper shake at the voice

            • viq@social.hackerspace.pl
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              8 months ago

              @foone@digipres.club
              In a book (Bobiverse) two moon sized bodies were accelerated to very close to speed of light, and hit a star, coming at it from opposite directions.
              Result was described as basically a nova.

            • Dan Turner@cosocial.ca
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              8 months ago

              @foone@digipres.club I wonder if the lab boys can find a way to convert energy to matter. If so, then you get an infinite iron machine because a portal is an infinite energy machine. If it go brrrrrr fast enough, Johnson might be able to create enough iron to end the sun.

            • MultisampledNight@peoplemaking.games
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              8 months ago

              @foone@digipres.club heavy coughing so the experiment went fine, it was quite interesting! the control group told me they’d be experiencing some influence as well, but it’s probably just some measuring error. at least that’s what the lab boys tell me.