Some questions about portals

Is possible other this is all covered in Portal Theory 301 at Mythal Falls, but I can't get a cess to their treatises, so ....

1) what makes portals?. They are currently opening up, in some cases only a few years ago. Are they just a random things, or something triggered by a high enough pressure of minds/magic/whatever in their home universe, and then chain-reacting out from there? Or is something actively making them -- and if so, will we ever find out who,and how,and why?

2) we never see any ocean portals, or midair portals, though some of the characters speculate about the possibility. But even if they're restricted somehow to touching ground, portals are large enough-- an apparent size of many miles in diameter -- that at least some ought to reach from the seabed to above the ocean floor. Is whatever opens portals forced to avoid water, or what is going on here?

3) we have at least one case of portal chains intersecting -- the two approach chains to Traisum that the Arcanans split up to cover in HHNF. How common is this? Are there other examples, or is this unique? And what is the chance that new universes will turn out to be connected to old universes? Or that new portals will open up in an already-explored universe?

4) do all new portals in a world form simultaneously, or do they do so in sequence? Is there some kind of relationship in size, position, or orientation between multiple portals in the same universe?

Don't really have any answers for you, but I suspect that that those questions will be addressed in future book(s). Especially so for the first one, since that's pretty much driving the whole story.

Gildomar wrote:Don't really have any answers for you, but I suspect that that those questions will be addressed in future book(s). Especially so for the first one, since that's pretty much driving the whole story.

The portals are driving the whole story, yes, but for all we know their creation may not be explained. (That would greatly expand its scope, admittedly...)

I always wondered about this. The environmental effects from those portals can be very extreme - if one connected an equatorial location to a polar location, you have temperature differences of about 60 or 80 degrees centigrade and consequences will be severe as the local ecosystems adjust.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/53/ offers a fascinating insight into what would happen if a portal opened at the bottom of the ocean and connected with a position five kilometres above current sea levels in another universe. If you are interested, the next page shows what happens if the portal drained the oceans onto Mars.

There's no telling what kind of chaos portals deep underground could create. Never mind draining the oceans, how about draining the core? 6,000 degrees of temperature difference plus a pressure difference of 300-650 atmospheres. I wonder if that's enough to spear the moon with a lance of iron...

There's got to be a point where the potential of adverse effects become globally catastrophic. If a planet is wrecked, its other portals would transmit the shockwave along a chain.

munroburton wrote:I always wondered about this. The environmental effects from those portals can be very extreme - if one connected an equatorial location to a polar location, you have temperature differences of about 60 or 80 degrees centigrade and consequences will be severe as the local ecosystems adjust.
...
There's got to be a point where the potential of adverse effects become globally catastrophic. If a planet is wrecked, its other portals would transmit the shockwave along a chain.

And we haven't seen that happen, so far. No wrecked planets, no dry ocean basins, no worlds with atmospheres dumped from an Everest portal to a sea-level one. Apparently something is preventing them from happening.

Maybe portals can't open if there's a high enough pressure differential between the two sides? But imnot enough of a physicist to calculate what that should be, and things like the Traisum Cut suggest that the differences can be pretty large (four mile-high cliffs of stone, for instance). Perhaps it has to do more with gravitational potential?

I have been trying not to "talk too much" but I caan't
resist saying that the atmosphere would flow from the
Sea-Level side to the High-Mountain side.

I suspect that Weber & Evans underestimated how much
such different-level transfers would change the planets'
atmosphere pressure and volume. I wish he'd put both
Portal-sides at more similar levels.

Pole-Equator and Winter-Summer have hardly been considered at all. They do think of animals, and plant
seeds, moving from one world to the other.

HTM

tonyz wrote:

munroburton wrote:I always wondered about this. The environmental effects from those portals can be very extreme - if one connected an equatorial location to a polar location, you have temperature differences of about 60 or 80 degrees centigrade and consequences will be severe as the local ecosystems adjust.
...
There's got to be a point where the potential of adverse effects become globally catastrophic. If a planet is wrecked, its other portals would transmit the shockwave along a chain.

And we haven't seen that happen, so far. No wrecked planets, no dry ocean basins, no worlds with atmospheres dumped from an Everest portal to a sea-level one. Apparently something is preventing them from happening.

Maybe portals can't open if there's a high enough pressure differential between the two sides? But imnot enough of a physicist to calculate what that should be, and things like the Traisum Cut suggest that the differences can be pretty large (four mile-high cliffs of stone, for instance). Perhaps it has to do more with gravitational potential?

Yeah, you're right abut which way the air would flow

I don't think we've heard of any Arctic/Antarctic portals. More evidence, perhaps, that someone is making them or at least exercising some control over which ones open. Any speculation on whom?

The answer in the Stargate universe is that gates resist the 'standard pressure' on each side.

So if you have water on one side and air on the other, water doesn't come pouring through.

grendel_one wrote:The answer in the Stargate universe is that gates resist the 'standard pressure' on each side.

So if you have water on one side and air on the other, water doesn't come pouring through.

Which would simplify things (unless you were the unlucky explorer to step blind into a sub-ocean or vacuum gate). But in this series we've seen examples of pressure equalization and water movement through portals.
<shrug> at least it gives us something to speculate about.

Jonathan_S wrote:

grendel_one wrote:The answer in the Stargate universe is that gates resist the 'standard pressure' on each side.

So if you have water on one side and air on the other, water doesn't come pouring through.

Which would simplify things (unless you were the unlucky explorer to step blind into a sub-ocean or vacuum gate). But in this series we've seen examples of pressure equalization and water movement through portals.
<shrug> at least it gives us something to speculate about.

Maybe theres a pressure limit change, beyond which either a gate doesnt form, or a difference in air/water flow through the gate modifies it in such a way that it shuts down?