[hinkley]

I'm kind of relieved by this.

The last wormhole conversation I had with someone, I imagined a weapon using a short-distance wormhole with the ends opposed 180 degrees, and using a star's own gravity to tear chunks out of it. Everybody dies from massive solar flares.

Of course time travel books, wormhole researchers, and myself all make the same mistake over and over: If you made a wormhole or traveled in time, why do we assume that the frame of reference of the system is our star? Sol is whirling around our galaxy and an alarming rate, and that's moving through the universe at a huge velocity. Why would the hole you're trying to make in space move along with our solar system?

If I traveled back to five minutes ago I'd die in hard vacuum. I'd have just enough time to realize how stupid I am. Similarly, every time I try to use the same wormhole it would be farther from where I am and the other end farther from where I want to be.

[andrewflnr]

AIUI wormhole mouths don't have a direction. They're spherical.

The picture of a wormhole as a bell-shaped indentation in a sheet, like the graphic on this article, is an artifact of trying to explain 4-d concepts in 3-d shapes (in 2-d images). For a being in the 2-d sheet, the wormhole is a circularly symmetric spot of weird-shaped space. In real 3-d space, a wormhole is a spherically symmetric spot of weird-shaped space.

[hinkley]

True. You could still use this to make two Lagrange points near the surface, mucking up everything. The fact that the hole has to be longer than the distance traveled would greatly reduce the gravitational field coming out of the hole.

You could still drop one end of the hole into the sun... (and I’ve just realized this was a Farscape plot and therefore how the idea got into my head in the first place)

[olemartinorg]

Presumably, if you're smart enough to make a time machine, you'd be smart enough to calculate the target position in both time _and_ space.

[hinkley]

I suspect if you had that much understanding of orbital mechanics, you'd be a billionaire already and not worry so much about time travel.

[TeMPOraL]

No sensible protagonist or villain use time travel to become a billionaire. There are usually better pursuits involved.

[VRay]

Except Biff of course

[lenocinor]

Maybe this sounds a bit silly, but this is honestly one of the most mind-blowing thoughts I've read on Hacker News. Thanks, I can't believe I never thought of this myself in the past. :)