While watching the latest Stratosphere Lounge I had a few thoughts.
- I noticed that you only use straight lines. But it shouldn’t be too difficult to create a y junction or even move past a star system. For the y junction you can just make one portal go that way and the second one go another way. And then you place them in a row and fire one of those two. It isn’t that great of an idea but I just wanted to bring it anyways.
- You mentioned that there might be secret routes. This lead me to the following train of thought:
- how can you keep those gates hidden, for the transport, for the building of the gate and for the activation. The transport to the location can be done with a cover up story. But the building is a bit more difficult to hide. And the activation isn’t possible. Both when it comes to powering up for firing the gate and the usage of the gate.
- What kind of power source can you use in a place where it is almost completely dark and cold? It has to be some sort of conversion of material to something different. And therefor it needs to be fed somehow by the respective material.
- How do you cool this power source?
- You said that the gate opens and closes almost instantaneously. I have a different proposal. Instead of opening and closing instantaneous it has a opening and closing time. And during that time it is almost like a plasma with extreme temperatures and spatial distortions. And that would just burn up everything in there. And if a ship would fly through there it might even cause the activation to fail. I prefer that way because as an engineer I feel more comfortable with something having an unstable and gradual activation time than if it is instant. This is a possible timeline.
- 0us: There is no portal there yet
- 0-100us: The portal is building up. Everything flying through that area then get’s completely destroyed. And perhaps the portals are most sensitive to attacks then.
- 100-1980us: The wormhole is active
- 1980-2000us: The wormhole collapses. The ships flying through there now get burned up. But nothing gets destroyed in that phase.
- One possibility is that actual consciousness is needed for general AI and super AI. And when consciousness is part of an actual supernatural soul, then we won’t be able to create actual general AI and super AI. We could make something which looks similar. But it is a physics problem in the end. I don’t say this is the best solution, but it is one possibility. But your version is pretty interesting. Even though I think my version is in the realm of possibility, I don’t think it is the best version for an interesting story. And one reason why I don’t fear AI is because I don’t read anything about it in the bible when it comes to the end of the world. This obviously doesn’t mean we can be careless, but I trust more in god than I trust in science. This is similar to back when scientists didn’t know if nuclear weapons could ignite the atmosphere or not. Now we know that they can’t but that was an actual fear back then. I assume this will be the same with super AI. But I obviously don’t know.