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Best Bug Ever

Today, Mike and I collaborated on the best bug ever filed. You can see it in it’s original glory here, or read the “edited for ease of reading” text version below:


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So I was chatting with one of our clients yesterday, and he brought up a really good point: We need a way to bend space-time, to allow for faster than light travel or what we’ll call “beaming technology” We’re branding it as “Beam-Outs”

Here are the requirements:

  • It must have two mouths which are connected to a single tube (called a “Throat”) Nikki mocked this up here: http://skitch.com/tylerwillis/xrpe/wh
  • The wormhole must be traversable, meaning that matter can travel from one mouth to the other by passing through the throat.
  • We should implement a wormhole that fits our client’s needs. An inter-universe wormhole would probably be overkill, as he’s looking simply to travel to other locations on Earth (and perhaps within this solar system). Let’s go for the low hanging fruit on this one and simply build an intra-universe wormhole.

    There’s currently a solution released by Albert Einstein under the Creative Commons Share-alike license, which I think we can adapt for our needs as long as we update it with new contributions. If needed, we can also reference the work of Dr. Evil. Most recent research indicates that wormholes must be made of spacetime foam (or “quantum foam” if you will) and must connect D-branes

    together by way of a flux tube.

    We need to build a special type of Lorentzian wormhole, which would allow a human to traverse unharmed. We’ll call this a “Krasnikov Tube”

    Firstly, we must acquire some exotic matter (any substance with negative energy density), perhaps we can put our new outsourced guys on finding this? We’ll also need a flux capacitor and an energy source capable of putting out 1.21

    gigawatz.

    We must be careful that we use the proper mathematics for a Krasnikov, it would be simple to make an error that would render the wormhole un-traversable. Here’s an example of what the wormhole metric might look like, see this mockup: http://skitch.com/tylerwillis/xrpc/use-this-one-or-people-die

    Eventually, the larger strategy is to implement a roman ring, which is a configuration of more than one wormhole. This ring seems to allow a closed time loop with stable wormholes, but we can probably wait until public beta for this feature. For Launch, we’ll need service between the following locations:

    Redwood City, Switzerland, Mountain View, New York, Western Siberia, South Beach, Taipei, and Canada.

    Here are some resources that might prove helpful:

    • Creating a Traversable Wormhole by Mohammad Mansouryar (http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=561)
    • Questions and Answers about Wormholes a comprehensive wormhole FAQ (http://webfiles.uci.edu/erodrigo/www/WormholeFAQ.html)
    • animation that simulates traversing a wormhole (http://www.spacetimetravel.org/wurmlochflug/wurmlochflug.html)
    • Until we can hire an astrophysicist (Matt has a listing up on craigslist), Noah will probably have to do most of the work himself. Knowing that, I’ve found some “primers” that might get you moving in the right direction:

      • http://science.howstuffworks.com/time-travel3.htm
      • http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Back_to_the_Future/60010110?lnkctr=srchrd-sr&strkid=1404851132_0_0
      • http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/strange/html/wormhole.html
      • I was thinking, we might want to higher a new QA team for this project, it would be a shame to loose the ones we’ve already trained to the deadly grip of space. Let me know your thoughts on this.

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        ——-Comment #1 From Noah Horton 2008-07-04 17:24:03

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        Fixed!

        It was actually pretty easy. The user of the wormhole simply ingests a compound to make their mind amenable to wormhole travel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD) and then allow them to enter the actual wormhole (http://www.acehose.com/mcart/images/ventduct22.gif). More portly users may need to use our add-on product (http://www.crisco.com/) to make it through the wormhole.


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