fuck it up and waste the first shot on a non-portal supporting surface
Create infinite energy machine
This is the correct answer given time and thought, but nah, would rather pee from my bed
Shoot the portal on two moveable plates. Move the plates as needed to ship goods. For instance, I imagine making a lot of money shoving sea ice into a portal exiting Lake Powell.
Granted. The portals immediately close when you try to move the plates.
As far as I remember in Portal, the portals could move if the plates moved.
So lore-wise it’s not supposed to be possible, but that one room does indeed have moving portals. The explanation is supposedly that portals disappear when the object they are on is accelerated.
In Portal 2 there was a section with moving plates, but only one portal could be on them.
shoot one portal in my bathroom. Carry the emergency bathroom gun everywhere just in case. No emergency will ever actually be important enough to use it but the peace of mind is always there…
The good answer is to create some kind of perpetual motion machine.
The cool answer is to create some kind of roller coaster that just keeps going and going
The fun answer is to create some chaos. Put one behind a door or something and the other in some unexpected place.
Oh, see I was thinking a portal on the ISS, but absolutely you could place one against the other, plop in a MASSIVE pole with teeth to match a gear, and just constantly generate power.
Read the instructions.
Sell it to a space agency that promises it to use it as a wormhole.It needs to be aimed at our moon (Selene) and an exo-dwarf planet.
Put the other portal in a geostationary space station: free access to orbit.
The single most (energy) expensive thing humans do is put things in orbit.
Love the idea, but (spoiler for the end of Portal 2) >!isn’t that kind of what Chell did at the end of Portal 2 to defeat GlaDOS? The portal on the Moon causes the portal on Earth to suction everything out into space.!<
The portals would just need to be in a pressure equalizing chamber for that.
Your spoiler tag doesn’t work
Strange. Thanks for the heads up. It looked to be working on my end using the Sync app, but I’ve heard Sync isn’t getting any regular updates anymore. Either Sync broke something, or I did!
Tap for spoiler
That’s how you do spoiler tag
You put it inside a space station… Or out the earth side portal in an airlock.
Chell put it on the surface of the Moon.
It would be a bad use of it, but probably pick a random road online and pick a random volcano. Whoever gets unlucky and doesn’t notice the nightmare portal in the ground gets a free trip to the base of a volcano at no cost. Would obviously need the portal to be in a location where you cannot just easily return from, though. Gonna turn a random volcano and random street into quite the tourist attraction for no reason.
- But two sheets of plywood
- Portal on each
- ???
- Profit
See, I don’t think water is the way to do it. I think you do it with a massive lead pole with teeth to lock into a gear.
Fully contained, no spillage
Part of me is thinking: “But doesn’t the water slow down each time it comes into contact with the cog?”
And the answer is the yes, but the answer is also, “it begins to accelerate again right after it falls off the cog.”
And yet it’s still fucking with me, and somehow I’m imagining water getting slower and slower and less energetic each time, as if gravity itself is being weakened
I mean, genuinely, this would be infinite energy. I was thinking of somehow using magnets and induction to generate power, but it would be excessively high frequency and would be antithetical to multi-phase power.
that looks just like me lol
Make a drain hole at the bottom of a lake, that comes out above it. Put in a water wheel, free energy.
Never thought about it before, but I guess this makes portal guns impossible, since scenarios like this break conservation of energy.
Maybe conservation of energy is wrong.
Well, the videogame kind are definitely impossible, but if the gravitational field could travel through the portal then it would probably still conserve energy. The gravitational interactions around vertical portals would be exceptionally weird. If they were close enough, you’d probably experience weightlessness while in between them, but I can’t wrap my head around what would happen as they move further apart. That makes me hope someone tries to make a mod that models that in Portal…
My first instinct would be that it would equivalent to putting another celestial body the mass of the earth at the distance from the earth is from each portal. Since gravity is a wave, it, in theory, would affect a region beyond what would considered “around” the portals.
So if you put one portal on the ground, and another 100 meters up, it would be similar to there being a second earth 100 meters from the surface of the earth, experienced by the entire earth (once the gravitational wave propagated.) How that would evolve over time is too complex for my basic understanding of physics, but a simulation of it would be a neat experiment.
Hm, I don’t think the “gravitational force” (as in the thing that pulls you towards the Earth) is a result of a gravitational wave; rather it is a result of you being in a static vector field. Gravitational waves are waves that travel through that field, e.g. the stuff that LIGO is measuring.
I’ve tried thinking about how it would work with portals. The problem is that the definition for gravitational field is g = -∇Φ where gravitational potential Φ(x) = ∑i(-G·mi)/||x - xi||, which depends on there being a single unambiguous “distance between two points” (x and xi in this case). But think about two points on the opposite sides of one “portal entrance” (e.g. imagine a portal entrance on a wall in front of you, with your friend on the other side of that wall). What is the distance between you and your friend now? If we’re to say it’s the same as it was without a portal, then (1) we get straight back to our problems with energy conservation, (2) there is no physical path between you and your friend that matches this distance as there’s a rift in space on that path. It would also be weird to conclude that it’s infinity - you can just go around the wall in our example and be right next to your friend. So we almost have to conclude that the shortest path would have to go around the portal somehow. Let’s just say that it would be the length of the shortest path around the portal. By the formulae for the gravitational field, this means that the gravity will pull you towards the shortest path to Earth’s center. If you placed one portal on the surface of Earth (let’s assume that the center of Earth is sufficiently far away that the gravitational field can be approximated as uniform in direction and magnitude) and another one somewhere far-far away in deep space (where let’s say that gravitational field is 0 for simplicity) it would look something like this:
Note how while the gravitational potential (Φ) is defined along the red line, the gravitational field would be undefined as there would be no gradient in the gravitational potential.
Now let’s try thinking what would happen on the other side. I’ll assume that our portals are just flattened wormholes with short throats. Thus we’ll just assume that portal entrances are actually “two-sided” (e.g. if they are just floating in your room, you can walk around them and see whatever is around the other portal at all times), and that the distance between them is 0 (let’s not think about how that works for now). Now the distance between an object on “one side” of first portal entrance and “the other side” of another portal entrance is even more messed up - I think the shortest path would technically be one that travels from first object to one of the “edges” of the first portal entrance and then from the corresponding edge of the second portal entrance to the second object. Thus the gravitational field around the other portal would look like this (I’ve added eyes to clarify how I’ve linked up portal sides):
The red line once again means that the gravitational field there is undefined.
Whew, it’s complicated, right?
Now, let’s put the second portal close to the first one. Note that I’m assuming here that only the shortest distance to the center of the earth matters.
The two red lines from before now overlap, and there’s another one - there’s no gradient when the distance to the blue portal and to the earth is the same. It’d actually be longer than what I’ve drawn, and some sort of parabola in those areas, but I’m too lazy to do that. Hanging in the middle of that red cross would be a weird feeling - your top half would feel as though you’re hanging upside down, while your bottom half would feel normal, and your arms and legs would be pulled in slightly different directions.
Although, I think that Newtonian definitions of gravity are playing tricks on us here. We should probably try using general relativity instead, but I am too tired to even attempt that right now, and I’d probably fail given that the fields involved there are a lot more complicated.
But you know it’s possible from firsthand experience. Whomsth’n’t reached terminal velocity by shooting the ceiling & floor and jumping in?
Maybe entering the portal takes as much energy as it would take to climb the long way? If the other end is on the moon you have to enter at 10km/s or something else you fall right back out. Warning: I am not responsible for damage caused by extreme tidal forces.
The trick would be finding the tallest vertical line of sight you can. Just making portable plates and flying one would be hard to beat, but failing that maybe a mineshaft.
Does it fire through water in the game?
No. The only water in the game is toxic (i.e. you die if you fall in) and you can’t fire the gun through it.
There are no bodies of water but you can shoot through a falling stream of it.
I’m going to be really sad when I fire my first shot from my single use portal gun only to find out the surface needed to be coated with moon dust.
One at the white house, one at the sun.
Be carefully secret service is now on to you. Maybe add /s so they know you’re joking and not intending any harm to dumb animals there
He meant to say “In portal”
Moon.
How fast would this suck up all of our atmosphere? Hours? Days?
Probably years, if not more. XKCD’s “What If?” has a nice explanation on a similar question, but in that case it was a portal at the bottom of the mariana trench and the question was about draining the oceans. The answer is that you probably wouldn’t notice in all your lifetime.
I remember that video, but I‘m not sure it is comparable — air might flow faster than water [citation needed] and there might be less of it [citation needed].
I’m pretty sure there is much more air. At least volume wise. Sphere volume goes up by radius cubed.
there’s more water than air (mass-wise).
Above you, atmosphere scale height is 8 km, with a density of 1.25 kg / m³.
That makes 10^4 kg of air above your head per m² surface area.
To get the same mass of water per surface area, it would only have to be about 10 m deep. But the ocean is kilometers deep in most places.
Unless the pressure differential causes it to escape the moons gravity well it would probably stabilize at some point before dumping the whole atmosphere, right?
Pretty sure the game theorists channel on youtube did that one several years back. It’s been a minute since I watched it but a search should pull it for you.
This one? https://youtu.be/0Hwjmek0Uvw It more addresses survivability in space, but unfortunately not the „drain earth of its atmosphere“ thing. Then again, in game the portal was closed quickly again.
Easy solution for that, you fire the earth portal on a wall inside some sort of specially constructed airlock.
That hard part would be getting the moon portal in a useful place, you’d probably need to go up there and find a good solid cliff face or something. On the plus side having done that you could be home again in a few seconds.
As long as I’m the first one through, the rest is set dressing.
One on my butt, one in the toilet, never need to poop again!
Bonus points if someone finds the toilet 😉
I mean you would still need to poop. But you wouldn’t have to worry about the time or your situation.
You’re pooping on the oval office’s desk arent you
