Wormholes are valid solutions of Einstein's field equations in general relativity. No one knows how to make one, but if they could be made a number of really smart people have put a lot of thought into how they would behave. Vergeworlds leverages that previous work and incorporates it into the setting.
Affectors have no scientific justification. There is no hint that something like this can exist. However, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. An alien view of the universe could potentially come up with scientific principles different from anything Humanity has achieved. Affectors allow many of the flashy conceits of space opera – hovercraft, tractor beams, force shields. But every attempt is made to rigorously work out what would happen if they were used, limitations, and unintended side effects. For example, if you can see through your deflector screen that means light can get through it. Therefore, don't expect it to protect you from laser beams.
Biological Science
The study and understanding of the underpinnings of life has allowed Humans to manipulate the basis of life itself.
Genetic Engineering: Gene editing tools allow engineers to modify living organisms, or even create new organisms de novo. Crops and livestock can be modified to survive under harsh environmental conditions, produce higher yields, resist diseases, and be more nutritious. Algae and bacteria can be created to grow in bioreactors and produce useful pharmaceuticals or chemicals. Novelty pets can be built, gene by gene.
Gene drives are genetic modifications that are designed to quickly spread through any population of sexually reproducing organism. The modification ensures that it is passed on to all of the modified organism's progeny, rather than just half as would be expected by Mendelevian genetics. In this way, a given genetic modification can be introduced to an entire population after several reproductive cycles. This tool can be used to drive populations, or entire species, extinct – for example, by ensuring that all offspring are male. In practice, designing an effective gene drive is expensive and a lot of work, and populations eventually evolve resistance to a particular gene drive so that to gain complete coverage a coordinated and sustained campaign must be waged, so it is only used when there is a strong motivation. But it has achieved some notable successes, such as the complete eradication and extinction of the malaria mosquitoes (Anopheles gambiae complex) and yellow fever mosquitoes (Aedes genus).
Environmental DNA, or eDNA, monitoring is a technique that allows for detection of life forms that are not easily located via traditional methods.
Living beings regularly shed biological material, such as hair, skin cells, or mucous, that contains copies of that organisms genome.
Analysis of sediment or water samples can detect this DNA, which can then be sequenced and used to discern what things are living nearby or higher in the drainage basin.
EDNA monitoring is useful for conservation work such as monitoring the population size, species distribution, and population dynamics of species of interest.
It can be used when introducing new species for ecosystem engineering efforts, or for detecting invasive species before they become widespread.
In addition, it has proven vital in protecting the Verge against the Squirm menace.
Major waterways and public wastewater are continually monitored for Squirm eDNA.
Positive detection gives an early warning to Squirm activity and allows ramping up a full scale military and public health response.
Monitoring of municipal waste streams also allows rapid detection of other public health threats in the form of infectious diseases and parasites.
It is illegal to use eDNA to track a specific individual without either their consent, the consent of a legal parent or guardian, or a warrant.
If consent is obtained or a warrant is issued, the person's DNA sequence will be entered into the database of sequences to be searched for in the Verge-wide system of eDNA monitoring stations.
Detection of a criminal in a remote watershed, however, is unlikely to trigger the coordinated effort to track down the source as detection of Squirm genetic material.
Germ line engineering: Before The Bump in the Night, it was not uncommon to modify the Human germ line. At first, it was used to prevent genetic diseases from being passed on to the next generation. As time went on, it was used to enhance one's offspring, in an attempt to make Humans stronger, more enduring, or smarter. It is arguable how much these latter efforts succeeded, as the more obvious changes tended to come with side effects that reduced the fitness of the child. In time, Human genetic engineering was being used for nothing more than vanity and decoration – pointy ears, exotic-looking eyes, furry skin, bumpy foreheads, tiger or zebra stripes or leopard spots, even striking blue or red skin could all be found in various populations. Since losing contact with Earth and the rest of the Earth-rooted network tree, this frivolity had largely passed. Interbreeding with the base stock and each other has diluted these exotic genes so that they are less common, but you still have occasional populations made up of designer appearances.
Agriculture: As described in the previous section, most food crops have been modified to better thrive in their environment and produce higher yields. Pests can be fought with gene drives or targeted diseases engineered to attack only the problem species. Most farming and ranching is performed to a large extent by robots, with sapient beings acting as overseers of the robot fleet.
While a lot of farming is done in traditional fields outdoors, in some areas it is beneficial to grow food in enclosed, environmentally controlled buildings to maximize yields and reduce water use, fertilizer runoff, and exposure to pests and diseases. Conversely, many people living in urban areas tend a small plot or hydroponics garden to have fresh local food they grew with their own hands.
In addition to traditional staples like grains, orchard fruit, vegetables, beef, pigs, and chicken, agriculture in the Verge includes a substantial amount of aquaculture (farming seaweed and ranching fish and shellfish) and insect farming (most commonly crickets, mealworms, locust grasshoppers, and the Blaptica dubia cockroach).
Synthetic foods are increasingly available, produced from algae or bacteria grown in bioreactors and processed into nutritious imitation foodstuffs or novel taste sensations. Meat from tissue cultures is also popular on many worlds, although it is largely limited to ground meat products like hamburger, sausage, and chicken nuggets. In principle you could grow a sirloin steak using the same methods used for regenerative medicine, but the cost would be prohibitive.
Medicine: advances in genetics, understanding development, and the nature of life mean it is possible to cure most diseases and recover from most non-lethal injuries, and in much less time than natural healing would take. Known infectious diseases have preventative vaccines or cures. Cancers can be fought and largely eradicated. Lost body parts can be grown in the lab and re-attached, providing full functionality after several megaseconds (months).
Many metabolic, autoimmune, and lifestyle diseases can be cured or mitigated, from diabetes and dementia to chronic lack of exercise.
Diagnosis is greatly enhanced by advanced MRI and ultrasound scanners, as well as rapid, convenient tissue chemistry assays and on-demand gene sequencing. Combined with an expert system AI, a portable tool the size of a large book can identify most diseases and injuries.
Increased medical technology means that most people can be active and healthy for at least 3 to 4 gigaseconds (100 to 130 years), with expected lifespans on the order of 5 gigaseconds (160 years). Before The Bump in the Night, medical technology on old Earth had advanced to the point where it was thought that aging no longer led to death and disability, but the Verge has yet to return to that level of accomplishment.
Naturally, Humans have the greatest understanding of Human biology. Pannovas are sufficiently biologically similar that they can benefit from the same medical advances. All known sapient species are descended from the same worms and bugs distributed by the Antecessors, so some aspects of Human medicine work on other species. However, much does not and figuring out how to extend these gifts to the other sapients of the Verge is an area of active research.
Computers and Electronics
Computation uses a combination of molecular scale classical computing merged with quantum processors. Classical circuits use a combination of electrical signals, light, and plasmons to convey signals and perform logic steps needed for computation. The performance of classical computing has plateaued for some time, with only incremental progress over the gigaseconds (decades). Most improvements have come from building quantum processors that can handle more and more qubits.
Machine learning algorithms allow computers to perform many tasks that were once the exclusive province of organic sapient beings. They can reliably recognize objects, respond to and use natural language, learn from their mistakes, and master skills involving uncertain information with complex changing rules and conditions.
So far, although computers are remarkable at solving particular tasks, no computer has been made or programmed that has true volition and free will. They do what they are designed to do, although with machine learning they may do it in surprising and unexpected ways.
A computer program may fool the naive into not realizing it is a computer, but with experience most people can recognize the tell-tale giveaways except in contrived situations.
Computation works to assist people in doing their jobs, freeing them from tedious and mundane tasks to allow people to contribute what they are best at – creativity, ethics, common sense, and high level decision making. In this way, computers greatly increase the productivity of a person for cognitive tasks, so that one clerk or researcher or police inspector can do the work of what used to require tens or hundreds of people.
Design
Mechanical structures are commonly designed using computational mechanisms that removes material where it is not needed while reinforcing areas predicted to have higher stresses. As a result, the interior frame of machines often ends up looking rather biological, with organic interconnecting trusses and laticework that increase strength while lightening the total structure and using less material for manufacture.
A common feature found in many devices is folding or compliant mechanisms.
Engineering methods partly inspired by the ancient arts of origami and kirigami have been developed that allow structures to fold or snap between two or more different shapes.
This allows devices that can be compactly stowed but unfold into active shapes, such as self-folding clothes, self erecting tents, kayaks that can collapse down to be carried in a backpack, or wide area orbital mirrors that fold into small boxes for easy deployment.
Energy storage in the Verge typically uses Superconductive Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) - a persistent supercurrent around a toroidal superconductive solenoid (a doughnut-shaped loop with electric current running around the doughnut tube going through the hole in the middle and then back to the outside circumference). This stores energy in a magnetic field that is entirely confined within the solenoid. The interaction of the generated field with the current that creates it acts to blow the solenoid apart, so the limit on the stored energy is set by the material strength of the support structure holding the solenoid together. Carboplast-carboweave composits are used for support – with adequate safety margins, this solenoid energy storage can store up to 20 MJ/kg. It can charge or discharge nearly instantly if required, with nearly 100% charge-discharge cycle efficiency.
The same technology can also be used for explosives with an order of magnitude higher yield than nitrated organics such as TNT, PETN, or nitroglycerine. The support structure of an over-energized solenoid is intentionally breached, allowing the field-current interaction to violently fling the particulate remains of the solenoid to produce a powerful blast and fireball. The detonation of a solenoid explosive is distinguishable from that of chemical explosives because a bright blue-white arc flash is produced at the moment of detonation.
Grid-scale energy generation usually uses non-orientable wormholes to produce antimatter on the fly and react it with matter while containing the dangerous penetrating radiation within the wormhole's contorted space-time geometry. This has long ago replaced nearly all other generation mechanisms for municipal electricity production without the pollution of burning coal or hydrocarbons, the long-lived radioactive waste of fission, the annoying intense neutron radiation of fusion, or the ecosystem-destroying impoundments of hydroelectric dams (although dams are still used for flood control and water storage – and where this is needed they may also include hydroelectric turbines to produce electricity as a side benefit). A rare alternative uses the near-critical collapse of a wormhole filled with boron-11 enriched boric acid to initiate proton-boron fusion, although these reactors tend to be even more finicky than those based on non-orientable wormholes.
Despite clean and cheap grid electricity, many people also produce their electricity locally. This is more common in rural areas where the penetration of the electric grid is lacking, and where the people tend to be more bloody-minded independent and less trusting of centralized organizations. Heterojunction photovoltaic cells allow durable solar panels of around 60% efficiency at turning light into electric energy for relatively low cost. Micro wind turbines and free-flow hydro turbines are also used as an alternative for when the sun is not shining in areas with access to regular winds or reliable water currents. Excess energy produced during sunny days or periods of high winds is stored in superconductive solenoids for later use.
Personal vehicles mostly consist of electric-powered wheeled vehicles. In dense urban areas, these may be scooters, motorcycles, or one- or two-person commuter pods. In more rural areas where the roads may be unreliable, off-road capability is common. To get between them, comfortable family cars may be used. Most personal vehicles have an electric motor at each wheel to allow all-wheel drive, and actively controlled suspension at each wheel for advanced traction control and improved all-terrain capability – if needed, the vehicle can "walk" with its wheels out of a sticky situation. Almost all vehicles manufactured in the Verge are capable of autonomous driving. Many people don't even know how to drive since their cars or pods do it all for them. The exception to self-driving cars are those manufactured for special sporting purposes such as racing or demolition derbies.
A popular alternative to the electric vehicle is the bicycle. The basic design has changed little in a dozen gigaseconds (400 years). Many bicycles are hybrids, using electric motors to either assist the rider or fully powering the cycle if desired.
Mass transit is the usual way to get around in urban areas. Subways move large numbers of people rapidly between stations, and surface buses take them to local stops. High speed trains move people between major cities. Since the same trains can also go through wormholes in the planetary or inter-planetary networks, buying a train ticket is the way to go to get anywhere any significant distance away.
Walking is the time-honored way of going places, and has never gone out of style. It is necessary to get to places where vehicles can't go, like in buildings. Many people also prefer to walk for pleasure, exercise, or to experience fresh air and see the scenery. In principle you could move through a wormhole under your own power, but the lack of gravity in the throat makes that difficult and the need for decompression between ends often makes it unwise. Some wormholes do offer float tunnels with ladder rungs for the curious, adventurous, or who don't want to shell out the money for a train seat.
Wormhole mouths are physical objects. They have mass, and momentum, and angular momentum, and kinetic and potential energy. Fling it forth and it follows a ballistic path, launch it into space and it follows a Keplerian orbit, just like any other body. Mass*, energy, momentum, angular momentum, electric charge, and all other conserved physical quantities are conserved locally. This means that if you enter a wormhole mouth, that mouth acquires your mass and momentum and charge and the rest. When you leave through the other mouth, that mouth loses your mass and charge, and acquires momentum and angular momentum opposite of what you leave with. This has several consequences:
But what about the spaceships?
The Verge is science fiction, so it has to have spaceships, right?
Well, sort of. People certainly want to get to other worlds, or asteroids, or other places far away from the world that they live on.
However, most of these needs can be met by wormholes.
As noted above, a wormhole with a jet of stuff shooting through it has the same physics as a rocket.
So, the projected wormhole mouth is itself the spacecraft.
But using wormholes for your spaceship has lots of advantages.
For example, you get to leave the engine back home. And the sensors, power plant, heat rejectors, crew, and all the other stuff you need to make a rocket work.
Just shoot the rocket jet through the wormhole, look through the wormhole with your sensors, and so on.
The crew are not so much crew as mission control, working in shifts at a control room to direct and operate the wormhole and the rest of the equipment needed to make it work and get it where you want it to go.
The mission control room might look like the bridge of a spaceship, but when their shift is up the crew can go back to their own homes and families for the night.
In addition, if something goes horribly wrong, you can lose your wormhole but you don't lose the lives of the people operating the craft.
If you want to get anywhere where there is already something there (like a world, asteroid, or artificial satellite), you launch a small wormhole mouth. It will be a few milligrams and steered by high powered lasers (for Humans) or tractor beams (for Gummis and Mants). When the wormhole gets there, it can gobble up the mass at the object in order to exchange with the mass of the people and equipment coming through.
In this way, valuable siderophile elements can be taken from asteroids and replaced by worthless gravel; people can be sent to other worlds in exchange for dirt, air, or water; and satellites can be drawn through, repaired, and then put back.
This leaves getting somewhere when there is nothing there. Which begs the question, why would you want to?
Close to a planet, satellites are still very useful for communication, planetary observation, and geolocation; and you need to put them in orbit where no pre-existing mass is conveniently floating around to be scooped up.
Consequently, Humans make aerospace rocket planes to loft satellites up into orbit.
Although usually they leave the satellite at home and loft a bunch of water with the same mass as the satellite and a wormhole mouth instead, and then trade the water for the satellite once the rocket is in the right orbit.
This greatly cuts down on the risk of losing your expensive satellite if the rocket blows up or crashes, as rockets sometimes do.
Mants and Gummis use tractor beams instead of rocket spaceplanes, projected from base stations on the planet to push and pull the satellite until it is on the proper orbit.
Farther from a planet, there is not much demand to put things out in empty space.
However, there are situations where this is desired - the gravitational focal point of a star makes a convenient spot for astronomical observation, and Antecessor relics are often found in deep space (and not likely to sit idly by while their mass is gobbled up or while they are being engulfed in a wormhole for transit to a planet).
These situations lead to the closest the Verge usually comes to a traditional spacecraft.
A convenient asteroid or comet is located on an orbit that minimizes the delta-V needed to reach the mission objective.
A milligram wormhole mouth is launched to this orbiting body, which serves as a source of mass to build the wormhole mass up to whatever the mission requires.
Powerful NOW reactors are used to shoot jets of atomic-hot plasma through the wormhole to act as a rocket torch, propelling the wormhole spacecraft to its target.
Probes, instruments, or other equipment can then be put out in deep space.
In the case of an Antecessor artifact, weapons and deflectors might be needed if the artifact is still operational and cranky about being boarded and looted; as well as away teams of researchers and the officers and security personnel needed to protect the researchers from Antecessor defense bots and death fields.
These defenses are kept back at home and projected through the wormhole, and the people kept there as well until they are needed for their job.
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A wormhole is supported by a wormhole frame. Much of the mass of the frame exists within the wormhole throat, although you will need some support at any mouth ready to be used in order to hold it up and keep it in place. It is sometimes necessary to shrink one mouth down to a much smaller size than the other, resulting in a constriction of the throat near that end. This can be done for initially projecting the wormhole or for time balancing and maintenance.
Some of this rebalancing is occasionally also necessary for interplanetary networks. The time dilation of an interplanetary wormhole is so extreme that it doesn't take much to make a time machine. In particular, if a second wormhole is sent off from a colony planet in anything other than a straight line, light traveling along the flat space rout between the worlds can make one leg of the time machine. To avoid this, the original wormhole is given some rebalancing to reduce the time lag and allow the second wormhole to be shot out to its destination.
The atmospheric pressure on a shirt-sleeve habitable planet typically varies by several hundred pascals as you get different weather systems across its surface.
A fully open wormhole exposed to this pressure difference would experience hurricane-force winds tearing through its throat. And that's just on wormholes connecting the same planet - interplanetary wormholes would have even worse problems with pressure differences. Not only would these winds be highly inconvenient, they would result in large unbalanced mass flows. Consequently, all traversable wormholes are equipped with airlock doors on both ends, and only one door is open at a time except in emergencies. This not only prevents passengers and freight from being blown out the wrong way, it allows operators more control over who enters and exits – a useful trick when you need to be careful about mass-flow balance.
Travel through wormholes can be rapid enough that the difference in pressure between different worlds can cause health problems. The greatest of these is decompression sickness – a problem that occurs when inert gases bubble out of person's blood when going from high pressure to low pressure. Decompression sickness can potentially occur whenever the total pressure changes by more than 4 kPa per kilosecond (15 kPa per hour), although with medication this rate can be raised to 100 kPa per kilosecond (400 kPa per hour). Commercial traffic between worlds generally occurs in pressurized train cars that will change their internal pressure slowly enough to prevent problems, and will generally supply decompression pills as part of the ticket price. If a long depressurization is needed, the train will usually pull off onto a side track to deperessurize before passing through the wormhole. The longest required depresurization time on the Verge for regular traffic between major worlds is the transit from Zhiroom to Whum, requiring an 8 kilosecond (2 hour) depressurization stop even with medication. These layovers prevent health issues for regular travelers, but issues will sometimes arise among stowaways in freight traffic or adventurers using the float tunnels.
Other acclimation issues take longer to resolve. Adapting to low oxygen levels or high levels of carbon dioxide can take days, and there is no acclimation possible to overcome nitrogen narcosis. Fortunately, medications are available to treat these atmospheric effects, and acclimation to a given atmosphere lasts for several days so that daily commuters between worlds can handle both atmospheres without trouble. For the dedicated traveler, gene surgery is available to build-in resistance to any of these problems.
Wormholes are pretty durable, but they can be driven to collapse, particularly when not doing so would force violations of physical law. Wormholes typically collapse only when the mass of one mouth is about to become negative, the wormhole is on the verge of becoming a time machine, or to extreme damage to the wormhole frame.
In principle, it should be possible to get a wormhole to pinch off from both ends when it collapses, trapping everything in the throat region forever pinched off from the rest of the universe. This would result in both mouths turning into black holes and then evaporating via Hawking radiation. The entire mass-energy of the mouth would be converted to energetic radiation with suitably devastating effects on the surrounding countryside.
In practice, this turns out to be very hard to do – collapsing wormholes always seem to find a way to expel their internal mass, often violently. But the final pinch-off happens when the wormhole has shrunk down the Planck scale after balancing its mass debt to the universe from both ends.
This results in a jet of material shooting out of the wormhole, extending several tens of wormhole diameters and causing extensive damage over that region. Any object that was inside the wormhole when it collapses is going to be completely destroyed, but at least its matter is returned to the universe.
The frame of a traversable wormhole generally indicates the break point in the throat with an illuminated line going around it. This demarcates the mass associated with one mouth from the other. As massive object move down the throat, the line edges closer to the destination mouth. If the line ever reaches one mouth or the other, it indicates that the mouth has zero mass, and that's when the wormhole collapses. This is a simple visually obvious safety indicator.
When making wormhole connections on a single planet, projectors are only needed in time-critical situations. Otherwise, you can just shrink down one wormhole end to a few grams and send it via post or courier.
In addition to military operations, rapid response wormholes can be used for disaster relief, emergency response, and other civilian operations. Still, usually when a rapid response wormhole is used, something has gone very wrong.
Normally this seems like it would be rather boring and useless, but for an obscure constraint from quantum physics called the CPT theorem. This theorem, which holds for all physical phenomena, means that the product of the discrete symmetries of charge conjugation, parity transformation, and time reversal equals 1. Huh? What does that mean? Well, parity transformation is equivalent to a mirror reflection; so passing through a NOW means parity is inverted. This means that exactly one of the other two symmetries must also be inverted for the CPT theorem to hold. The thing coming out on the other end is still manifestly going forward in time so it must be charge conjugated, whatever that is.
Charge conjugation means you turn all particles into their antiparticles. So anything passing through a NOW emerges on the other end made entirely out of antimatter.
Clearly, you are not going to send people through a NOW. Not only would the person die, but they would devastate the surrounding countryside where they emerged. What these wormholes are useful for is making energy. Both mouths are suspended in a container of hydrogen gas. The wormhole is engineered so that the throat has constrictions at both ends but an expanded region in the center. Periodic oscillations in the mouth sizes allow in pulses of hydrogen from both ends, one end taking in considerably more gas than the other (the mouths alternate which one takes a big gulp and which one takes a sip). The mouths then constrict down to trap the gas in the central reaction chamber in the middle of the throat. The gas from one side annihilates the gas from the other, resulting in the production of a flash of energetic penetrating radiation. But the radiation cannot escape the reaction chamber (it's made of space-time itself, and particles must travel through space time, and this chamber is almost entirely pinched off from the rest of the universe until the mouths open again so there's nowhere for the radiation to go). Within milliseconds the exotic short-lived particles have decayed away and the gamma rays have been down-scattered via the Compton process to the point that what you have left is a very hot hydrogen plasma.
Then the mouths open, the hydrogen plasma escapes, and more hydrogen is taken in. The hot hydrogen plasma is used to run an MHD generator or heat a working fluid for a gas turbine or otherwise used to do work that creates electricity.
NOWs are much more complex to manufacture and stabilize than the run-of-the-mill orientable wormholes. You can't let the frame from one end touch the frame from the other, or they annihilate and the whole thing goes boom. In addition to complicating how to hold the wormhole together, it also means you have much less leeway for imbalanced mass flows. Their delicate nature makes them impractical as a weapon. Although in principle they could be used to produce an antimatter stockpile to use in munitions, in practice there are easier ways.
This chamber is filled with boron-11 enriched boric acid, a white crystalline solid. As the pressure increases this results in proton-boron fusion, with the radiated bremsstrahlung trapped within the confined space-time geometry to re-heat the fusing fuel.
The fusing mass is compressed for sufficient time that the reaction yield is nearly 100%, leaving a highly compressed plasma of fusion-hot helium nuclei with left-over hydrogen and oxygen.
This all occurs in less than a millisecond. The net result is just a nuclear flash, thermal pulse, and blast wave with no penetrating radiation or lingering radioactivity.
Collapse weapons can be made at arbitrarily small yields, from pea-shooters that would just take out a residential house to terrible warheads that can lay waste to a large metropolitan area.