Wormholes in Space

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Which is totally realistic. Nobody knows how to make negative mass. It's totally plausible that you just can't make/collect that much too near a large body of normal matter (like say a star).

Surely if that was the case you could move it later?

Still your point is a good one. So there isn't anyway to mitigate the effects of a wormhole on a planet with comparable technology to create the wormhole in the first place?

What would be the effects and how far away should a wormhole be located from a inhabited planet to be safe?

Also; IL?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Sindri

IL?
But it is different since the wormhole can still function at earth distance from the sun.

Still your point is a good one. So there isn't anyway to mitigate the effects of a wormhole on a planet with comparable technology to create the wormhole in the first place?

What would be the effects and how far away should it be located to be safe?

I'd suggest pretty far away from the entire solar system. Huge negative masses will wreck the orbits. If you dragged one down to 1 AU of the sun it might not mess up the sun itself but the inner system is going to be disordered pretty badly. (A positive jupiter mass would be similarly damaging.)

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Sindri

IL?

Fugetaboutit.

But it is different since the wormhole can still function at earth distance from the sun.

Maybe. Not if it's just impossible to "make" that much negative mass near a stellar mass. Which is totally plausible, since while we can kind of predict what negative mass would do, we can only handwave how to make it in the first place.

Still your point is a good one. So there isn't anyway to mitigate the effects of a wormhole on a planet with comparable technology to create the wormhole in the first place?

There certainly couldn't be. It seems that parking negative Jovian equivalents on a planet surface without destroying it is way more superscience than wormholes in the first place. Besides there are three really good reasons to never put a wormhole in an atmosphere, regardless: 1) Wormholes may be degraded by everything that passes through it; letting air through then is a bad idea; 2) Even small differences in temperature and pressure on either end can have disastrous consequences on either side of the system; 3)contamination by alien ecosystems.

What would be the effects

Negative mass repels normal matter with an anti-gravity force that's equal in magnitude to the gravitational attraction of normal matter.

and how far away should it be located to be safe?

Like I said that totally depends on how your negative matter machinery works. It could be safe in a normal planetary orbit. It could be totally unstable unless it's a full light-year from any stellar mass. We don't have a clue how this stuff could work.

[Refplace]

One way to make worm holes would be to manipualte gravity and thus create a negative mass effect. If you can do this then perhaps you can insulate or shield the effects of gravity well enough that it wont affect nearby objects.
This may let you put one in Orbit or farther out and possibly say it lowers the gradient so the force drops off fast with distance. Or it could say anything on the other side of a shield is unaffected.
Still putting it on a planets surface would have issues as the atmosphere tries to go through, or you have a vacuum chamber encase the wormhole.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Stable Wormholes may (possibly must) require massive negative mass equivalents (like negative Jupiters even for throats a few meters in diameter).

Not necessarily, according to Visser, Kar, and Dadhich (2003). Traversable wormholes still need to be fairly massive (asteroid-equivalent), but the exotic matter requirements can be arbitrarily small.

Of course, you can say that these guys were wrong if that produces the setting you want.

Originally Posted by Sindri

What would be the effects and how far away should a wormhole be located from a inhabited planet to be safe?

Same as any massive object, and probably at least as far as the planet's Roche limit (a couple of diameters, say).

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by thrash

Not necessarily, according to Visser, Kar, and Dadhich (2003). Traversable wormholes still need to be fairly massive (asteroid-equivalent), but the exotic matter requirements can be arbitrarily small.

Interesting, I have an older book by Visser that that says the opposite. I guess it changed.

Still there's good reasons not to put on a planetary surface.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Refplace

One way to make worm holes would be to manipualte gravity and thus create a negative mass effect. If you can do this then perhaps you can insulate or shield the effects of gravity well enough that it wont affect nearby objects.
This may let you put one in Orbit or farther out and possibly say it lowers the gradient so the force drops off fast with distance. Or it could say anything on the other side of a shield is unaffected.
Still putting it on a planets surface would have issues as the atmosphere tries to go through, or you have a vacuum chamber encase the wormhole.

Quantum gravity may be a nice looking hole in modern physics. But to me it sounds like an unexplored cave. While we may not know what's in it, I doubt it's hiding a unicorn.... Maybe just Batboy. :)

[vicky_molokh]

Place it too close and it just falls through the planet, burrowing a hole-sized tunnel right through.

[JCurwen3]

Of course Stargate comes to mind.

I might be remembering wrong, but at least in the series I seem to recall that the stargates actually technically weren't one big (maybe SM 1, 1.5, 2, or even 3) wormhole, but rather loads and loads of tiny wormholes.

When you "entered", you got destructively scanned by the technology of the gate and then the information about how to rebuild you along with your subatomic matter was ferried through these countless tiny wormholes and you were "reintegrated" on the other side by the advanced technology of the gate on that end.

Even if Stargate actually didn't do it like that, that seems to me like the most reasonable way to have wormhole-based travel that could be initiated from a planet's surface, traversible by a human. The demands for stabilizing a wormhole, after all, go down dramatically based on their size. Expanding and stabilizing a wormhole so that it can fit an electron through is much much easier (based on our current understanding) than doing the equivalent for a man-sized object, and expanding and stabilizing billions and billions of electron-sized wormholes so that a whole broken down human and the information to reconstruct it on the other side would also require much less effort.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Place it too close and it just falls through the planet, burrowing a hole-sized tunnel right through.

That part is easy to avoid. Orbits, you know.

However, if it's massive enough its own tendency to repel the planet will pose a problem