The Wormhole Hall of Shame

27 points by rznicolet 4 days ago

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.

Chaosvex - an hour ago

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.
- procarch2019 - 41 minutes ago
  
  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.

smcameron - 3 hours 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.

Terr_ - 2 hours ago

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.

Terr_ - 4 days ago

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

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

- 3 hours ago

[deleted]

LoganDark - 3 hours ago

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

sirvicks - 3 hours ago

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

turtleyacht - 2 months ago

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

rznicolet - 4 days ago

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

inigyou - 2 months ago

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

Terr_ - 4 days ago

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.