Grrl Power #1402 – Spacehole
It’s less that the FlyBall is blinking and shimmering and making noises like an agitated gerbil, and more that it’s doing… something. The visual are mostly for the audiences benefit, though if Sydney was paying attention, she would notice something going on. She has gotten used to being orbited by multicolored light sources though, so this isn’t enough to catch her attention.
As to Sydney’s question… Well, the reason I have Altus’s answer trail off the last panel is 1) an advanced space alien probably knows more about physics that we do. We like to think we mostly have a handle on stuff, but dark matter comprises about 27% of the universe, and dark energy accounts for about 68% of other… “stuff,” and we don’t know what that is either. So, we don’t know what 95% of the universe is made of, and we also haven’t married Newtonian and quantum physics, so it’s fair to say that there might be some significant surprises left for use to discover. Maybe instead of nickel-iron, most rocky planetary cores are tungsten, which would maybe make up for 2-3% of the dark matter. Or maybe a bunch of aliens thought it’d be cool to paint their planets Vanta Black and we just can’t see them.
BTW, “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” sound cool for sure, but it’s just a fancy way for scientists to say “we dunno.” It’d be like trying to recreate grandma’s holiday ginger cookies from taste and not being able to figure out what that last seasoning is, and calling it “Dark Spice.” It’s cardamon, BTW.
The second reason for the trail-off is, I just have no idea how to answer it. It seems to me that wormholes would be weapons of mass destruction. Like they destroy actual mass, and lots of it. But that model of a wormhole that shows two pieces of graph paper being connected by a funnel is obviously such a wildly simplistic view of what’s going on that any speculation I made based on that would be like trying to recreate grandma’s cookie recipe after shoving one of the cookies up my ass. Which wouldn’t give me an informed starting point regarding the ingredients, is what I’m saying. Unless the human rectum just happens to be an excellent platform for ferreting out cardamon. I wouldn’t know. I would be surprised to learn if that’s the case, but I think it’s safe to assume our crinkle stars aren’t cardamon truffle hogs.
Ooh, look! A new vote incentive! And it’s updated with color!
Well, in progress, obviously. I have another one that’s actually a bit further along, but everyone was all, “Sydney Kobold vote incentive!” So I switched to this one. Plus the other one was a multi-character picture so it will actually take me longer to finish. I hope to have an update for this one each week, so stay tuned. There is a slightly higher res version on Patreon.
By the way, this gunmetal blue-ish background and teal pencils are how I draw the comic. I set it up this way so I don’t have to spend all day staring into a bright white blank page.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
The delivery of quantum mechanics puns can be quarky.
If they don’t work, you just need to put a different spin on them! Try -1/2
It all depends on how you observe it.
Hey, you changed the punchline by looking at it!
Are you two dingbats trying to get the ship crushed like a soda can?
School bus rules apply: no talking to the driver until the vehicle has come to a full stop.
My comment from the last panel still applies. Last strip revealed Daphne’s barely-clothed *ss planted firmly on Altus’ crotch with her legs draped over and restricting an arm being used to actively pilot a ship through an apparently highly dangerous wormhole. Now she’s actively fondling his chest and face, and Sydney looks like she wants to get in on the action. Or is her face not flushed, but instead just reflecting the glow of Altus’ red skin?
And now the fly-ball is acting up! Is this the end of our intrepid adventurers? Tune in next week to find out!
TBF, there’s probably no way you could *actively* fly a ship through something like this. More like “set a course and let the fastest navicomp going do the no-crush adjustments”.
Still not something I’d want to take any chances with…
Sex in the cockpit (no pun intended) is not conducive to long life, health and happiness.
FTL cruise is not a critical phase of flight, so the “Sterile flight deck rule” would not apply anyway.
At these speeds, nothing but a computer could savely initiate and execute a emergency maneuver anyway.
Also, I don’t think many places in Cora ship are “sterile” anyway.
The medbay may be, unless the surgical gear comes with sterilisation fields?
Uh huh. So why is Altus keeping his hands firmly on the controls?
I suspect there’s at least some involvement for the pilot in this process.
I’m not sure of Daphne’s chances. At least not in this body.
Isn’t Altus into redheads?
They can easily change her hair color. If he doesn’t just “Tag in” another body.
Oooh, I love nerdery! And cardamom in a cookie is creative, I’ll have to try it!
If you’ll forgive me for being “that gal” though, “effect” as a verb means “to cause/to make something exist,” as in “I want to effect change.” In the last panel, Altus is saying that gravity doesn’t cause objects to exist, it causes the universe to exist. I believe you meant “affect” – and these two words being so close is indeed a blight upon the language.
He did say that his translator might not be perfect…
Someone just got themselves a No-prize for that explanation of the >cough< typo…
You’ve never had cardamom cookies? You’re in for a treat!
Something’s about to happen… guess we’ll have to wait and see.
I think the actual reason they call it “dark” is that, whatever the heck it is, it doesn’t seem to interact with light. Hence, “dark”.
Not so much “I donno” as “We can’t see it”.
That’s really a distinction without a difference. Both are true.
There is a pretty obvious difference: If “dark” just means “doesn’t interact with light”, then “dark” matter remains “dark” matter even after we DO know what it is…
According to Wikipedia, it’s called “dark” because Fritz Zwicky coined it as dunkle Materie and the translated name outlived the idea that it was non-luminous ordinary matter.
I think that in panel six, you want “affects” rather than “effects”.
…The answer is kinda just that your mental model for what a wormhole is is just fundamentally wrong?
It’s like asking why you can fold a piece of paper and touch the opposing edges together without annihilating all the paper in between. Like, even with the ‘pencil through folded paper’ analogy, I feel like the answer to “but why doesn’t it tear a hole in the paper where you didn’t punch the pencil through” would be obvious?
Maybe another format of analogy will help. Here’s a graph-format simplified explanation:
Imagine that you have a set of points A, B, and C. A is connected to B with a line of length 1, and B is connected to C with a line of length 1. The distance you have to travel to get from A to C is, therefore, 2. Now, if we made a wormhole between A and C, that is like adding a new line of length 1 directly between A and C. You can now get from A to C by traveling only 1 unit of distance.
Haha! The Flyball is listening !
Also.. Is Digit being a lapdog or being catty?
That’s Daphne, a.k.a. ‘Harem’.
Yeah, still a weird choice on Dave’s part to send Blonde Harem along rather than one more distinct from Digit (and even Sydney to some extent).
That’s Daphne / Harem. And yes. Which would make her a lap… errm… “cat”.
More like lapbrat…
Iirc, the “flyball” is the orb that Sydney/Halo can use to open her own wormhole for FTL travel. So it undoubtedly has other movement-related functions that she has not yet enabled or simply doesn’t fully understand yet. Like detecting other wormhole phenomena in space, etc.
“It looks like you’re trying to form a wormhole. Would you like help with that?”
The orbs channeling Clippy. Not what anyone wants I think.
Rather have chippy than Google AI
Clippy is not dead, he is secretly evolving into a paperclip maximizer.
Technically, what the orb uses for FTL transport was called “Eatherium causeway” and was something very different from quaint wormholes as any detection therof was quite a news and a big surprise most probably because it is N-th tech level.
Maybe the pulsing flyball is raising its hand because it wants to “Um, actually” that explanation
“So what is it?”
Cat
So it seems as they’re talking here that they do enter one of the station’s wormholes and the Flight orb is reacting to it… I suppose its also possible that the Flight Orb is reacting to Sydney gaining a degree of understanding about wormholes or some insight into the Orb’s working. We think of it as the “Flight” orb but its powers seem much more focused around gravity and it might have additional abilities in that scope which are yet to be unlocked.
It’s possible that the orbs are sentient and learning.
It would simultaneously be very amusing AND Sydney’s personal nightmare, if she could level up the orbs by studying physics, in addition to battling alien cannon fodder.
The short answer would be that what goes through the wormhole is not passing through 3D space.The standard illustration for that is sticking a pin through a sheet of folded paper.
The problem with that is that a sheet of paper with a few pins in it is really hard to fold or twist further without tearing great holes in it.
The other problem is that wormholes kind of can’t work, because it doesn’t matter if two black holes are connected to each other, you can’t exit either one. And you turn into spaghetti before you hit the event horizon. And then there’s the time dilation.
You’d need a really good FTL drive to even theoretically exit a black hole… but it wouldn’t survive entering, so… I’d just assume any wormhole is just… a couple fast-travel points that used to be black holes, but aren’t black holes now.
I believe classically a wormhole requires some means of preventing the event horizon from forming by reducing the amount of space curvature at the center of the mass, before or after it turns into a black hole. That is why we’re pretty sure we need matter that reacts negatively with gravity, so that it can prevent the center of the huge pile of mass that is macroscale black hole from turning into, well, a black hole.
Wormholes are not a variety of black hole, they are there own completely separate thing. They are massive, but not black hole massive. More like super-Jupiter massive (yes, you can have low-mass black holes, not the point).
The traditional explanation of a wormhole taking a sheet of paper and curving it so two separated points are brought together *is* misleading, but only in that the paper doesn’t curve. A wormhole takes two separate regions of space, and makes them the same, so if you go through one, you come out the other, and doesn’t affect the intervening space’s curvature at all (except for the normal curving of space through gravitational effects, which is localized.
Also, a wormhole isn’t a tunnel, it’s a doorway. You don’t have to travel along a tube, you just step through it and you’re there.
I thought that we got a (there is strong doubt about it being ‘the’) bridge between classic and quantum physics. That’s special relativity I believe, with a formula that produces classic physics (with near undetectable differences) at low speeds and smoothly transitioning into the kind of weirdness we also see in quantum physics at very high speed.
It is the integration of gravity in quantum physics that has so far eluded physicists. Even inertia requires a far from elegant addition to the standard model in the form of the Higgs boson.
And wormholes, in all their science fictiony variations, need not be weapons of intergalactic destruction. The assumption is that the inside of the event horizon is not part of the same thing as outside the event horizon. That makes it not more dangerous than a black hole. That is plenty dangerous but not a galactic scale threat.
Since whatever happens inside a black hole, or worm hole, has little to no relation to anything we think to understand about our physical reality, our writers can fantasy freely about space-time not existing inside one and thus travel being instantaneous (if you can get into and out of one of course).
After all, the theoretical counterpart of a black hole, and exit nexus of a wormhole, has yet to be observed. Which is suspicious as white holes are by nature the opposite of circumspect. Something sun sized that outputs the energy of an entire galaxy is not something that is easy to overlook for the several sky-mapping missions that are going on. A vast region where all interstellar gas has been blown away by an exceedingly bright object in the center is not difficult to see, and it is the kind of weird phenomena that astrologist and astrophysicists are looking for in the millions of pictures that have been taken by both gamma ray and IR observing satellites.
So, assuming that we ever discover the virtual and hypothetical particles needed to form wormholes, there is not really a risk (under known physics) that they are any more dangerous than a c-fractional space ship already is.
There have been those who made the argument that the bigbang was a whitehole.
I’m not sure where I sit on that argument, but in a universe where we are unable to directly detect 95%ish of the mass/energy in it? I’m not even sure we can say what is not there based on what we have observed. And all of this is before we get into space itself expanding.
If I had to guess, I would personally say that we don’t know near what we think we do.
But given what we know of the universe, I would wonder if perhaps some of those whiteholes could be dumping their matter out in the darkmatter/energy format or if perhaps a whitehole has some responsibility for the expansion of space itself. There are theories on those topics but they rarely come up in fiction.
Relativity is still a classical model of physics. Also, we don’t need a bridge between classical and quantum models of physics. Classical physics is an approximation that ignores quantum effects, which is good enough at macro scales, just as Newtonian physics is an approximation of Einsteinian physics, that ignores effects at high velocity or gravity. We do still need to quantum theory of gravity, but there are promising avenues to explore. Also, the Higgs field (of which Higgs bosons are a local excitation) isn’t inelegant.
“Dark Spice” was my drag name. ;-)
In Victorian times there was no concept of a vacuum, so scientists invented the concept of Aether. “We can’t see it but we know it’s there so we’re going to call it Aether.” Dark Matter (What was wrong with the original name?) is similar. We can’t detect it directly but the math doesn’t work right unless it’s there. Well it may turn out to be like Aether, we just don’t have the right explanation yet, but it is an interesti9ng idea.
“Aether” sounds like magic. “Dark Matter” sounds factual and science-y.
”Aether” sounds like good magic. ”Dark matter” sounds like evil magic.
That’s not entirely correct. There was a concept of a vacuum, but the problem was the idea that light was found to be a wave, and a wave needs something to propagate *through*, just as sound propagates through air (or water, or metal, or whatever). Aether, or luminiferous aether, was the hypothesized medium through which light propagated. This hypothesis triggered a wave of attempts to detect it, culminating in Michaelson and Morley disproving its existence in their eponymous experiment.
To my(limited) understanding about wormholes, special and general relativity.
a. no altering the topography of space isn’t generally destructive to the rest. Ask any sattelite orbiting earth, because that is how gravity works.
b. Wormholes do not pass through “everything inbetween” otherwise they wouldn’t work to bring two points closer together.
c. Wormholes seem to be a shortcut through time and space. Most of the what we would call ftl involved.
I would explain it like this.
Sydney and New York are removed pretty far from each other enogh that the speed of causality puts a fundamental limit on the syncing of clocks between these places.
Now imagine some genius finds a way to send messages through the planet instead of around it, boom suddenly the speed of communication between these points goes up.
The same is true for wormholes, but than instead of a three dimensional situation it does the same on a four dimensional situation with the fourth dimension being time.
I feel the need to point out the helm has cup holders and their appears to be at least one post it note on the console… this has to be the most accurate ship design ever.
In the last panel, the word ‘effects’ (a noun) should be ‘affects’ (a verb). Captain Pedant, at your service! You’re welcome.
Ooo, FlyBie is starting to get a glow-on
Further proof these orbs have some sentience to them.
The Air Ball Leaping into her hand when needed unbidden was another.
This one is Learning. *We can do that? * *We Can Do That! *
“Maybe instead of nickel-iron, most rocky planetary cores are tungsten, which would maybe make up for 2-3% of the dark matter. Or maybe a bunch of aliens thought it’d be cool to paint their planets Vanta Black and we just can’t see them.”
The sun contains 99.86% of the solar systems mass. And most of that 0.14% will be in the gas giants, not the rocky planets.
We detect planets either via IR or becasue they pass between us and their sun, dimming the starlight. But they would not be a relevant factor if we could see them easier.
If very dim stars (hard to detect) and black holes (impossible to detect when not actively feeding or lensing starlight) are more common then we see, that could account for a relevant amount. But planet masses are a drop in the bucket.
Why does the blue orb being focused on seem ominous to me?
Wormholes are bypasses to normal space topology. Let’s start with a different image; let’s use a globe. My analogies will be imperfect, but will get closer to the real idea.
A straight line between two distant enough points on the globe would be a lot faster than following the curvature, and it would not destroy anything on the surface. it would just be a tunnel. Still not quite what we want, but we have already demonstrated that there is no need to destroy anything along the normal path that objects take. Demonstration is complete, moving on to next ideas.
But if we don’t even want the tunnel, we want to directly connect two holes so that walking into one is walking out of the other. 3D space isn’t going to do the trick. But 3D space is all that exists, sort of. Gravity, and hypothetical negative gravity, can distort space time, but it doesn’t distort in a proper direction. if the implications of a certain mapping model (the Penrose diagram) are correct, distorting space enough to create a black hole causes the black hole to point ‘out’ of our universe, and into another.
There’s issues with that description, not getting into it because its way too complicated. Moving on.
Now, if Negative Mass (not anti matter, that is just reversed-charges matter) exists, and you could some how manipulate it and form it into a spinning ring around a spinning black hole, you could remove the event horizon and expose the singularity, which for a spinning black hole would be a ring.
Diving into that ring is still death: exiting out of a white hole is an explosive event. But we have done part of what we need.
The next step would be to spin up fresh singularities without ever letting them form event horizons, and ‘aim’ a pair at each other, sort of. If you do it right, instead of poking out into another universe, these ‘tunnels’ meet and merge. You now have a massive pair of dense matter rings that must be avoided at all costs, but there is no space/distance between them, because these singularity tunnels always had a length of zero, even if that makes no sense to us.
This is how you get universes with ring gates to hop between star systems.
The next step is somehow doing all of this from only one side, popping out the other end inside of our universe.
The step beyond that is to make it so that the wormhole generator can itself travel through the wormhole.
Notice that the details keep getting vaguer? that’s because we are deviating further from reality. But, this is *VERY ROUGHLY* a description of the stages, were this possible in something close to our universe.
Hmm…it looks like Bluey about to Doey sumthin…
I am honestly surprised neither Sydney or the navigator/ pilot turned on the Flyball interface for this. They both know it exists and is both amazingly advanced and simple to operate. Seeing what it shows about travelling the wormhole would give them information about whoever made Flyball (possibly the wormhole as well).
Which brings up an interesting thought – Does Flyball have access to the systems underlying the wormhole gate because it once belonged to an individual involved in creating it?
Anyone else notice the wiring in Sydney’s glasses? Does she just have a better translator than everyone else and getting more from that conversation than others?