We all like Stargate.

[conuly]

We all would like to have a functioning Stargate network. I mean, even if we couldn't traverse the stars, having them set up worldwide would revolutionize travel, and arguably be more useful to the average Joe. (Especially if they take less energy than current travel options. How much energy does it take to run the Stargate, anyway? I never see them quibbling over travel costs. "Sorry, guys, our electric bill was through the roof last month. Either we cut off-world trips down to a minimum, or we take out half the lightbulbs in the building. Your choice.")

But... different planets rotate at different speeds, don't they? Even if you're self-selecting for "places comfortable for human societies", there's a difference. There's a difference in rotation speed between Miami and Denver too, I bet. Isn't there? Like the outside of a bike wheel is moving faster than the inside, so Denver is moving faster than Miami? Wouldn't you stumble? Wouldn't everybody stumble stepping through a Stargate?

These are the sorts of questions that keep me up at night.

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Comments

[low_delta]

I would think that your speed when you stepped through, would be relative to the gate. Because if you choose other points to be relative to, then why would the center of your planet be a more likely choice than the center of your sun? And then you start wondering about, not only speed, but direction. Best to just stick with the simplest answer.

[conuly]

Because if you choose other points to be relative to, then why would the center of your planet be a more likely choice than the center of your sun?

For the same reason when you jump, you land back on Earth rather than shooting off sunward.

[alexseanchai]

honestly explaining the Stargate program's budget as a line item in the US military budget means I am perfectly happy to assume they have all the money they could want

Denver and Miami do move at different speeds around Earth's axis, and planets that don't have a 23h56m sidereal day will use different numbers in that math

I'm with low_delta, I think velocity when entering and exiting Stargates is relative to the gates themselves

[wendelah1]

I loved the quilts.

[conuly]

Me too! I wasn't expecting to like them as much as I did - I felt the same way when I first saw Starry Night in person, like they'd actually been underhyped.

[conuly]

True, the USA military is effectively printing its own money.....

[kengr]

Track down Larry Niven's article "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation". It's in several books.

Short answer teleportation violates at least three conservation laws.

Conservation of energy:
because the potential energy of the point you leave likely doesn't match that of the point you arrive.

Conservation of momentum:
that's the one you were worried about

Conservation of angular momentum:
this gets even messier

It doesn't help that energy is a scalar (just has magnitude) while momentum and angular momentum are vectors (have both a magnitude and direction).

The best handwaves for dealing with this don't really seem likely for the Stargates. So were are stuck with massive usage of plotonium as the answer.

[glinda]

Wouldn't you stumble? Wouldn't everybody stumble stepping through a Stargate?

I seem to remember that early on all the human travellers did stumble and there was an issue with nausea for some people, which to a certain extent just required the body to get accustomed to - in later seasons we see seasoned travellers catching/supporting first time travellers much as you’d help someone off a boat which suggests the different speeds does have an impact - but I think the travelling also stabilised once they were able to adjust the dialling computer at Cheyenne to allow them to dial other places. One of the many stabilising effects of the DHD that they don’t have but that other gates do.

However, travelling between Denver and Miami would require you to go via another planet because you can’t travel directly between gates on the same planet, to quote Daniel Jackson “it’s like dialling your own number.” Having two operating Gates on one planet causes a bunch of problems, seismic as well as geopolitical...

[wendelah1]

Don't Stargates utilize wormholes for transport? That sounds impractical for on-world travel. Now those Aschen transporters--that's what we need.

[hilarita]

Yes. Clearly the Stargate has something in it to absorb that energy, so you don't yeet yourself into next week because of different relative velocities.

[mindstalk]

Or track down Vernor Vinge's novel The Witling, which tries to take teleportation with conservation. I think Vinge has said he had to dump angular momentum conservation, but energy and linear momentum factor in.

Being able to teleport rocks from the moon is a strategic weapon.

[mindstalk]

"Travelers enter through the event horizon, which dematerializes them for transport through the wormhole, to be reassembled on the other side"

So I'd expect you to have the velocity/momentum of the receiving Stargate.

You walk through, so it must impart your velocity relative to the sending Stargate, but I think the velocity difference between the Stargates gets nullified.

[sallymn]

They did mention the amount it was costing to run the thing once, I think, very early... then obviously decided not to think about it :)

I love Stargate, but always watch it with a large helping of handwavium nearby....

[readerjane]

We need Randall Munroe to weigh in!

I dunno. Instantaneous transportation would mean you could live in a really low-cost place but work in a higher-paying place. But then so could everybody else, so maybe cost of living would even out? Nah, it would probably re-distribute based on where it's pleasant to live (rather than on closer to jobs).

[hudebnik]

I read an SF story 40 years ago in which a minor plot point turned on a character saying a particular teleportation booth "must have been an antique", and another character realizing this meant it had poorer compensation for changes in gravitational potential energy than the modern models: people were getting hot or cold flashes as they came through depending on whether they had come from a higher or lower elevation. I think there was some discussion of angular momentum too.

The main point of the story, in the Campbell "how would real people react to this technology?" sense, was that easy teleportation produced "flash mobs": the news reported something interesting happening somewhere on Earth, so hundreds or thousands of people showed up there to see, and then the sudden crowd became the news story itself.

[conuly]

easy teleportation produced "flash mobs"

Wow, prescient.

[conuly]

So everybody takes two steps to go from Denver to Miami - once to the designated "travel planet", once to get to the other city.

[alessandriana]

This makes me wonder, with multiple gates on one planet, how they made sure they were dialing the right gate on the way home. I can't remember if the series ever addressed that.

[cellio]

That building probably has twice as many lightbulbs as it needs anyway.

Have you read the "Jumper" books? (Not the movie; that shares a name and maybe a vague idea but is not what you're looking for.) I found it refreshing to see altitude and velocity being considered.

[glinda]

From memory I think most planets only have one gate for that reason. Earth only had two because it’s original gate was in Antarctica and got overrun by ice so it became inactive. (There’s an episode in the first series where something causes the wormhole to disengage early - maybe the source gate is attacked? - while part of the team are still in transit, so the wormhole hops to the nearest gate and they get spat out in Antarctica. They manage to get the DHD reconnected but can’t dial home because both gates have the same point of origin, unbeknownst to them, they’re dialling their own number effectively.) Therefore it’s probably the DHD being connected to the gate that controls whether that gate is the primary gate for dialling in, in the rare case of multiple gates on one planet. I think that’s why the Russian team were able to get away with their adventures for so long because they had the DHD so they could make their gate dominant at specific times, it wasn’t until their connection got stuck, that they were discovered because SGC offworld teams couldn’t dial home anymore as earth was already ‘engaged’. To extend the telephone metaphor, like having a parti line and the person upstairs leaving the phone off the hook.

In order to intentionally have multiple gates Co-functioning on one planet you’d have to find a way to give them different points of origin- maybe however they managed gates on ships? (I seem to recall most incidences of second gates in the show turned out to be SURPRISE giant space ships...) I don’t know that they ever explored that - I guess they must have done in Atlantis but as I haven’t really watched the spin-off shows I don’t know...

[glinda]

Sure, the moon would probably be the most practical option for that. But to be fair I think that if that technology actually existed and we weren’t doing interstellar travel with it, then putting gates on the Moon and Mars for exploration/colonisation purposes would be the most realistic/practical option.

[fyrdrakken]

Yeah, Star Trek used transporters for onworld travel. There was a line in a DS9 ep about Sisko at the academy in San Francisco coming home to New Orleans for dinner when he got homesick.

[fyrdrakken]

I had this conversation just last week. I am A) in Dallas County (a current hotspot), B) working in a medical testing lab (where we are overloaded with processing Covid tests), and C) a viewer and reader of progressive news outlets. My uncle lives in Wood County about 90 miles east of me, (which as of the latest tracking data has 92 cases and 5 deaths) and watches Fox News. He asked when I'm coming for another visit and when I laughed and said he doesn't want someone coming out from Dallas right now, he was surprised because he thought the pandemic was over (and hadn't been a big deal anyway).

[conuly]

I'm so sorry to hear that your uncle is... well... watching lies, really.

[conuly]

I bounced so hard off the first of those books in high school.

[conuly]

I really was thinking of the general concept, not SG specifically :)

[sgatazmy]

I am fairly certain people used to stumble, get cold, and feel sick in early episodes? I guess it was too hard to keep that idea going each episode.

I miss Stargate.

[offcntr]

That was one of Niven's teleportation stories. Don't remember the title, but the plot device involved supporting a murderers alibi by fudging the time of death; teleporting the body changed its temperature.

[offcntr]

I kinda liked it, but rarely go back; don't think it's aged that well. The sequel involves some pretty brutal conditioning scenes, almost torture porn, so again, not a favorite one to revisit.

The third and fourth books, however, where the protagonist is his teenage daughter. are among my favorite rereads. (Impulse and Exo, the latter of which involves teleportation-based space exploration.)

[adafrog]

These are good questions.