Oceanic Portals?

With a large fraction of the globe covered with oceans, there aught to be more than a few portals on or under the sea. That would make for some rather spectacular ( ) cross-dimensional currents unless there is something that prevents it.

And with that, the possibility of a naval battle of two in later books goes way up...

Max wrote:With a large fraction of the globe covered with oceans, there aught to be more than a few portals on or under the sea. That would make for some rather spectacular ( ) cross-dimensional currents unless there is something that prevents it.

And with that, the possibility of a naval battle of two in later books goes way up...

There must be something that prevents it. Both the currents and oceanic portals. The currents because that would change sea levels and all the coast lines appear to be the same. The portals because we don't hear of any sticking out of the water. The average portal seems to be a circle 10 miles in diameter half buried in the ground. That means it is five miles high. The vast majority of the ocean is no where near that deep. If there were portals in the sea both sides would be able to sail through a lot of them in surface ships.

There may be something very different from standard portals under the ocean, but I can't even guess what it could be.

Nicholas

brnicholas wrote:

Max wrote:With a large fraction of the globe covered with oceans, there aught to be more than a few portals on or under the sea. That would make for some rather spectacular ( ) cross-dimensional currents unless there is something that prevents it.

And with that, the possibility of a naval battle of two in later books goes way up...

There must be something that prevents it. Both the currents and oceanic portals. The currents because that would change sea levels and all the coast lines appear to be the same. The portals because we don't hear of any sticking out of the water. The average portal seems to be a circle 10 miles in diameter half buried in the ground. That means it is five miles high. The vast majority of the ocean is no where near that deep. If there were portals in the sea both sides would be able to sail through a lot of them in surface ships.

There may be something very different from standard portals under the ocean, but I can't even guess what it could be.

Nicholas

If you ask me its plot considerations that mitigate against too many ocean portals. If a portal opens between two oceans, fine and dandy. If one opens between ocean and land? Now we have two oceans. If one connects the bottom of the ocean to say Mount Everest, one world turns into Waterworld and the other into the Sahara writ large.

So the transfer if water in one of those more dynamic connections will be make for an impenetrable barrier without the ability to fly through the portal. Sure it'll be cool, but won't facilitate the progression of the story at this point in time.

PeterZ wrote:
If you ask me its plot considerations that mitigate against too many ocean portals. If a portal opens between two oceans, fine and dandy. If one opens between ocean and land? Now we have two oceans. If one connects the bottom of the ocean to say Mount Everest, one world turns into Waterworld and the other into the Sahara writ large.

So the transfer if water in one of those more dynamic connections will be make for an impenetrable barrier without the ability to fly through the portal. Sure it'll be cool, but won't facilitate the progression of the story at this point in time.

Actually even a portal between two oceans could screw things up quite well. Imagine a portal on one world that sat across the Atlantic's Gulf Stream off of their Georgia and dumped it into another world.

Even if we ignore that that relatively high velocity flow of fairly warm water would would to do the destination world, losing the Gulf Stream would likely put at least that Europe, if not that whole planet, into heavy glaciation (ice age). That could make travel through it to the next portal - interesting.

Lots of interesting bits here.
1) with, what 70%?, of the earth's surface being ocean, there SHOULD be more ocean portals than land ones.
2) there aren't nearly that many. Textev doesn't support the existence of ANY. Of course, neither does it deny it.
3) due to the logistics of modal transfer, especially on the Sharonan side, it seems clear that ocean/land portals are non-existent (or vanishingly rare, at least), as all land based portals assume you can run train tracks and trains through. There'd have been a mention of 'well except for...' if there were an active universe with ocean/land portals
4) ocean/ocean portals would be little different from a usual ocean voyage - and wouldn't be worth mentioning if they weren't actively being traversed.
5) Ocean/ocean portals could easily be smaller and entirely underwater. I kept expecting the cetaceans to know of one, or find one. Surely there's a good reason why non-human intelligences form a major part of the Sharonan universe.
6) What WILL be the role of those non-human intelligences?
7) as for the existence of ocean (presumably /ocean) portals, DW has referred to them - e.g. in the 3 Hoarsemen podcast at SFSignal. So they seem to be a thing.
8) as for the mismatched altitudes and temperatures involved with ocean portals, we already have the problem (to a lesser extent) with atmosphere. There are specific mentions of altitude differences - which SHOULD lead to Universe X having lost half its atmosphere to Universe Y, which would totally devastate the ecology of X. Y would pass on the extra to any universes it connected to, perhaps, but increasing airpressure massively would also make a massive change to ecologies.
9) Moreover, a portal Amazon/Alaska (or Siberia, say) would create huge, permanent storms in both worlds as the weather heat engines of both worlds were permanently fouled up.

There do seem to be some nasty consequences of these portals that have been pretty much neglected - or glossed over quickly in passing.


PS the Podcast also refers to the (unspecified) source of creation of the portals. IF it's aliens, say, the consequences might be minimized by design. Himself also says that only 3 people (David, Joelle and Linda) in the entire Multiverse know what that source is.

brnicholas wrote:

Max wrote:With a large fraction of the globe covered with oceans, there aught to be more than a few portals on or under the sea. That would make for some rather spectacular ( ) cross-dimensional currents unless there is something that prevents it.

And with that, the possibility of a naval battle of two in later books goes way up...

There must be something that prevents it. Both the currents and oceanic portals. The currents because that would change sea levels and all the coast lines appear to be the same. The portals because we don't hear of any sticking out of the water. The average portal seems to be a circle 10 miles in diameter half buried in the ground. That means it is five miles high. The vast majority of the ocean is no where near that deep. If there were portals in the sea both sides would be able to sail through a lot of them in surface ships.

There may be something very different from standard portals under the ocean, but I can't even guess what it could be.

Nicholas

PeterZ wrote:If you ask me its plot considerations that mitigate against too many ocean portals. If a portal opens between two oceans, fine and dandy. If one opens between ocean and land? Now we have two oceans. If one connects the bottom of the ocean to say Mount Everest, one world turns into Waterworld and the other into the Sahara writ large.

So the transfer if water in one of those more dynamic connections will be make for an impenetrable barrier without the ability to fly through the portal. Sure it'll be cool, but won't facilitate the progression of the story at this point in time.

Yep... So I didn't miss anything obvious like a paragraph or two explaining why it doesn't happen...

Now, some portals are big, miles across, and high. They are also deep. Where are the volcanoes? You might get the whole planet sucked through one of these thing, slowly...

Max wrote:Yep... So I didn't miss anything obvious like a paragraph or two explaining why it doesn't happen...

Now, some portals are big, miles across, and high. They are also deep. Where are the volcanoes? You might get the whole planet sucked through one of these thing, slowly...

It's been a while...

I think it would be fairly safe to add some reasonable speculations to this line of discussion in the form of a few fairly obvious rules about portals:

1) The center of each side of a portal has to have matching or close to matching gravitational potentials; The windy portals are basically weather like events, and are not driven by mass shifting. Over a long enough interval, the winds will blow in both directions. Also, no sucking the whole planet out of one universe into another.

2) Since portal creations are a fairly recent phenomenon, (several paragraphs present evidence for that), it is also possible that portals also disappear eventually. There might be some archaeological evidence for "extinct" portals, but somebody would have to be looking for it to see it.

3) Portals require a solid matrix on both sides of their centers to form. More likely, they are a surface phenomenon, meaning that the visible part of a portal will be very close to a semi-circle and the edges of a portal, where it meets the surface, will be vertical, not oblique. This makes the volcanic possibilities moot.

4) Further, bodies of water, particularly salt water, inhibit portal formation, which would put portals in continental interiors, and away from the coasts. No oceanic portals and no spectacular naval battles.

My guess is that there are Ocean Portals.
I agree with Dathi that DW has referred to them.

Cetaceans might use them (only, in that case, why are
they going to so much trouble to get onto a train?).

If a Portal had ocean on one side & land on the the other,
well, all land on Earth is above Sea Level!
So the Interface is a cliff, on each side, except in those
rare cases where the land is low enough to make a beach.

HTM

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:My guess is that there are Ocean Portals.
I agree with Dathi that DW has referred to them.

Cetaceans might use them (only, in that case, why are
they going to so much trouble to get onto a train?).

If a Portal had ocean on one side & land on the the other,
well, all land on Earth is above Sea Level!
So the Interface is a cliff, on each side, except in those
rare cases where the land is low enough to make a beach.

HTM

It's possible that the oceanic portals don't lead into the same universes as the land ones.

Don

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Howard T. Map-addict wrote:My guess is that there are Ocean Portals.
I agree with Dathi that DW has referred to them.

Cetaceans might use them (only, in that case, why are
they going to so much trouble to get onto a train?).

If a Portal had ocean on one side & land on the the other,
well, all land on Earth is above Sea Level!
So the Interface is a cliff, on each side, except in those
rare cases where the land is low enough to make a beach.

HTM

Depending on the geology, a beach could form fairly quickly (a few thousand years) even if the portal results in a very large cliff. Gnisses, granites and high density sandstones will take a long time to erode, layers of shales, slates and evaporites will erode very quickly. Depending on the fetch of the waves, you could get enormous rollers slamming into 3000+ ft cliffs which would make sea stacks fairly quickly.