Talk-Polywell.org

I'd worry more about getting that magic trick to work than worrying about the pneumatics.

If the magic can be made to work, just open up two channels, one to Mars, and the other to Mercury. Send SO2 to Mercury ... it is wicked heavy, and responsible for much of that excessive atmospheric pressure. Mercury is downhill in the solar gravity well, has almost no atmosphere, and gravity comparable to Mars. For that matter, just dump it into space down near the surface of the Sun. Use that flow to drive turbines to pump other gasses into the channel to Mars.

It does seem a waste, but there are easier sources of sulfur in the outer system, if you don't mind the radiation. It does remind me of an old Playboy cartoon, though. At a cocktail party, amidst the civilians, is a general in full uniform and fruit salad. He quips, "And another question is, why are we throwing away perfectly good toxic irritants?"

One might fix the Venusian atmosphere that way. although you still need to fix the spin, which would be really difficult. Danged fool planet turns backwards, with a day longer than its year, which would probably be unlivable even with a sweet atmosphere.

Tom Ligon wrote:
One might fix the Venusian atmosphere that way. although you still need to fix the spin, which would be really difficult. Danged fool planet turns backwards, with a day longer than its year, which would probably be unlivable even with a sweet atmosphere.

You've seen the discussion about making cloud cities on Venus?

The sun doesn't cause gravity on Venus. Venus is responsible for the gravity on Venus. The sun's connection has no part in it. If it were orbiting at 10X the distance, it would make no difference in the gravitational gradient at the surface of the planet. It is the gradient, the slope of the field, that is manipulated by the negative mass that holds the mouth of the wormhole open, and that mass stretches the space-time such that it is negative, regardless of what the field gradient is at the point it opens the wormhole, so the gravity of the sun has no bearing on it. The felt effects are those where the gradient is manipulated from whatever it is in the surrounding field, to the negative slope needed to hold the wormhole mouth open.

Tom Ligon wrote: Use that flow to drive turbines to pump other gasses into the channel to Mars.

What would a column of C02 weigh from the height difference between Venus and Mars? Without calculating, i'd bet it would be some hellish pressure.

I suppose I could figure it out.

GIThruster wrote:It doesn't take any energy to move mass through a wormhole.

Good by conservation of energy.

Gravity wells in our solar system. http://xkcd.com/681/ Venus is a ways down the Sun's gravity well from Mars. Orbital velocity difference makes up some of that, but there's still a LOT of energy needed to lift anything from Venus to Mars.

hanelyp wrote:Good by conservation of energy.

. . .there's still a LOT of energy needed to lift anything from Venus to Mars.

That would be true if the matter were traveling in the space between the two points. It is not. Any use of a wormhole will result in an apparent conservation violation if you think of the matter moving between the two points. It's not. It's taking a shortcut. Now if you are speaking about the kinetic energy of matter as relates to the Sun, and how that changes when it emerges on the other side of the wormhole, that is a different story and I'm not sure what's the solution to that. I suspect it relates to the topological change itself, when the wormhole is created, a certain amount of energy is put in, just as is necessary when one digs a tunnel.

In any event, the gravitational potential energy in relation to the Sun of any matter on Mars or Venus, is completely dwarfed by the potential energy as relates to the planet in question. There is no reason to reference any of this as regards the gravity of the Sun that I can see.

If the gravitational gradient is irrelevant than any worm hole device can be turned into an infinity power generator. Somehow I don't think that's likely to be true even if Worm holes are possible.

hanelyp wrote:

GIThruster wrote:It doesn't take any energy to move mass through a wormhole.

Good by conservation of energy.

Gravity wells in our solar system. http://xkcd.com/681/

Great chart. Thanks for posting that.

Diogenes wrote:If the gravitational gradient is irrelevant than any worm hole device can be turned into an infinity power generator. Somehow I don't think that's likely to be true even if Worm holes are possible.

GIThruster and Diogenes, here you have one of the great arguments regarding this kind of device. It applies to transporters, too. Would it be possible to cause a conservation violation this way? The debate is quite unanswered. You can find theorists who argue that the conservation violation is implicit and would occur. But people who work with General Relativity don't buy it. Most SF stories on this take the view that nature won't let you get away with it, so you see such devices as requiring "transfer points" to be well out in space so you have time to use your fusion engines to compensate for, say, the speed differential between two stars, or the implied speed difference for how deep in the gravity well you are.

This won't be settled until we do the experiment, which requires making the magic device. And THAT is probably impossible. This may be a good thing, when you consider some of the more nefarious applications for such a device. Beneficial gas is not all it could transport.

It should never be forgotten that the High Ground is almost always an advantage in a military conflict. Heinlein pointed out, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, rocks would be relatively easy to launch from the Moon, and would hit Earth like a sumbitch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_I ... h_Mistress

It also applies to Mars, which might even clean up the two rocks that orbit it in this process.

In general, always remember to stay on good terms with your uphill colonies.

I don't know how wormhole connections will work, but gravity is quite reliable for the conventional means of transportation, and Venus won't be throwing many rocks at Mars. We have managed to use Venus as a gravity slingshot for launches from Earth to the outer system, but it is complicated and takes time, in contrast to the uphill colonies which could send a retaliation directly.

In one model I've seen described, when an object travels through a wormhole the details of energy and momentum transfer are taken out of the event horizons themselves. One implication of this model is one end of the wormhole being depleted of the energy needed to form it as matter passes one way. However it works, if energy conservation is to apply when moving mass between different levels in a potential well, something in the mechanism must account for the energy difference.

Tom Ligon wrote:. . .you have one of the great arguments regarding this kind of device. . . Would it be possible to cause a conservation violation this way?

I don't believe in conservation violations of any sort. I think when you see what appears to be one, you need to look more deeply at what's going on to figure out why the seeming violation. I would just note, that life is full of examples of seeming violations, if you don;'t look at all the details very carefully. And it is these details that inform and will better inform us, what is possible so far as wormholes are concerned.

While I understand what Dio and others are saying as regards a seeming violation, I think there are details that answer these issues, and one of them is that negative mass always appears from a distant perspective, to create a conservation violation. If you don't account for the fact that the system is part negative mass, you will get a crazy seeming violation. And wormholes are always composed of negative mass to hold the mouths open, so they are going to seem to create violations until you look more deeply.

GIThruster wrote:siphon

Follow that line of thought.

To move matter between two points at different potentials, you need to supply the corresponding energy difference, which is path-independent for a conservative force field. The wormhole is part of space; therefore the same considerations apply inside it as outside it.

hanelyp wrote:In one model I've seen described, when an object travels through a wormhole the details of energy and momentum transfer are taken out of the event horizons themselves.

Which as far as I can tell (I'm not a GR specialist) is nonsense based on an arbitrary mathematical overconstraint. A wormhole mouth isn't a thing that teleports stuff; it's just a place (and not an especially well-defined one) that stuff passes through on its way to/from other places (the wormhole's throat, for example). Empty space can't gain or lose momentum or energy based on what passes through some other region of empty space.

Also, traversable wormholes don't have event horizons.

...

I have previously maintained that if Mars and Venus were on opposite sides of the sun, ram pressure would be sufficient to push Venus' atmosphere through the wormhole. I no longer maintain this, as I believe it incorporates at least two overly simple-minded assumptions, that may or may not cancel each other out. I'll get back to you once I've thought it through with the tools of general relativity...

...

Also, it occurs to me that if we have wormhole technology, it could well be because we have M-E technology, and changing the orbit or rotation rate of a planet is just a matter of building a big bank of impulse engines and running them for a bit.

So just grab your stuff from the rings of Saturn..?

paperburn1 wrote:So just grab your stuff from the rings of Saturn..?

This has always been a tentative plan.





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millen ... Easy_Steps