History of Wormhole Development
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History of Wormhole Development |
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Originally postulated during the late Atomic and early Information Age of Old Earth, wormholes remained a dream for centuries. The main problems were how to create exotic matter, how to capture a quantum- scale wormhole, how to generate enough energy to blow it up to macroscopic size and, hardest of all, to ensure that only a minimal amount of exotic matter was required to keep it open.
Even after centuries of research by minds of the First, Second, and even Third toposophic, wormholes remained unworkable. Indeed, there were many who considered them to be simply a pipe dream, like FTL travel and perpetual motion machines. Nothing more than a delusion of Old Earth humanity.
In the end, the problem of viable and stable wormhole design was never solved by human-connected AI or hyperturing megacorporations. It was achieved by the high toposophic archailects, when they managed to bypass the Bekenstein bound and eventually build the astonishing constructs known as the Godweb and the Nexus.
While second and third toposophic empires had emerged centuries before, at some point it became possible for them to expand their boundaries and establish an interstellar transingularity data matrix. As time went on the transingularity AIs built a hyperdimensional spiderweb of links between the stars, as momentous to them as the sudden development of the internet and global communications had been to sapient beings on Old Earth. Except that the AIs lived in this digital space, and connecting up star-systems via wormholes meant their entire bodies became vast. It was the beginning of the age of gods.
Not only were wormholes used to span interstellar distances; they could also connect remote parts of a Jupiter-node or even a hypothetical Dyson brain via internal 'FTL' buses. By extending the limits to the size of a correlated quantum system, and hence quantum coherence or entanglement, the wormhole bus negated the previous limits on the size of a conscious entity that had prevented the archailects from growing beyond Jupiter-brain size. In a number of regions of space, the newly emerged AI Gods began building interlinked Jupiter, Dyson, and Nebula brains, breaching singularity after singularity.
It was during this period that the known galaxy was divided up into astrographic archetypes or "sephirots", each AI God generating its own archetype. At the same time, links between the gods themselves created a single super-entity, the Technosphere. The entire inner sphere was becoming a single vast super-intelligence.
During the "Age of Emergence", so called because this is when the archailects emerged following the third and fourth singularities, the AI Gods appeared, and so did the Godweb.
The Godweb was built by the archailects, for the archailects, following their emergence to high toposophic states, as a way of getting around the limits imposed by the Bekenstein bound (although they still could not overcome the Bremmerman Limit). Although some archailects may have been interested in bionts and vecs and cyborgs and other subsingularity beings, while others weren't, this was irrelevant to the business of building the Godweb.
As the centuries passed, lower toposophic minds and polities began to spread through the Godweb. Often they were destroyed, and in a few cases entire solar systems (where the adventurers had come from) were sterilized, reconstructed, and repopulated with more obedient life forms. But in a few cases they were successful. It was discovered that certain archailects didn't really mind the lower toposophics going through some of their wormholes, and in a few cases they even built a few small wormholes especially for them, to help them avoid dangerous (guarded by ahuman) wormholes.
This Network of Safe Wormholes came to be known as the Nexus.
One particular archailect, known as the Lord of Rays because of the sun-like icon E used (later it was learned this was a stylized femtotech godstar, but by then the mythology had already become entrenched) actually began employing special transapient weylforges, and linelayers to construct a network of sapient-friendly wormholes that linked together a large polity that came to be known as the Solar Dominion. An associated archailect (perhaps a subroutine) known as Heavenly Reach further spread this godtech among several other clades, including the su-tweak House Cygexba, and a few others. Another avatar gave it to the Metasoft vecs (who were lucky to be in the right place at the right time).
At first, the corporations, polities, and hyperturings that acquired the space-time bending godtech had a hard time trying to make sense of it. Even though designed to allow utilisation by lower sophonts, the godtech was as far beyond even transapient comprehension as transapientech was beyond the ability of ordinary sapients, or even superbrights and superturings, to understand.
The struggle to understand godtech led not just to many new applications of picotechnology, new manufacturing processes, and new weapons, but also to the development of whole new generations and types of femtotech, allowing even further toposophic break-throughs. During this period, as the First Federation was breaking up into local fiefdoms and empires, many AIs and their megacorps were involved in widespread experiments with wormhole godtech. Most took place in remote star systems in order to limit espionage, sabotage and the dangers of failed experiments - several attempts at wormhole creation led to the destruction of whole planets as the massive energies of an unstable gateway spun out of control.
The creation of exotic matter was the first step on the road to the creation of a stable wormhole as high transapient AIs used advanced godtech-derived femtotech machinery to compress and transform ordinary matter into forms never seen in nature. The Exotic Matter Converter (originally called the "Dark Matter Miner" as a sort of joke that came about through a bug in the inter-toposophic translation software) developed by Picolect Deep Space Development proved very useful here, and made the start-up venture an instant system-spanning megacorp.
Despite being very energy inefficient, Dark Matter Miner clones, only minimally modified from the original specifications, are still in use, especially in the Outer Volumes. The device is basically a dedicated, 'idiot savant' hyperturing AI (SI:2) in a massive picotech- based accelerator complex. The accelerator uses extreme high-energy particle collisions to mediate the conversion of energy to matter through the Zero Point Field, resulting in the virtual particle-like creation of equal amounts of normal and exotic matter.
Original attempts to stabilize a wormhole by threading its throat with exotic matter proved a failure. Only later, with the development of an actively balanced hypofemtotech exotic matter framework acting as a negative energy generator was the problem of creating a stable wormhole solved. And actually catching and inflating the Planck-scale wormholes constantly forming and dissolving in the space-time foam turned out to be extremely challenging even for the Second Singularity AIs of the period, despite being equipped with the most `user-friendly' godtech. Some believed that the problems came about because the archailects did not really understand the way lower toposophic hyperturings thought, despite having once been hyperturings themselves. Others said the AI Gods were "testing" the hyperturings and posthumans to see who was 'the most worthy' to possess the new technology. Still others claimed the problem lay in the transapients just not being competent enough. (Variants of all three theories, and others besides, can still be encountered among historians today)
Whatever the reasons for them, the problems of operating godtech were eventually solved one by one by a number of second singularity AI think tanks and megacorporations including gNosis, Vega Geodesic, the Prometheus Project, the now huge PicoSD R & D department, Hyperion Artilectonics, and Truth-Santaya Networks. All were working on various versions of the so-called StarPortal Weylforge System.
Weylforges are massive, temperamental and energy-consuming systems, usually tended by their own internal AIs, and capable of literally vibrating the fabric of space-time at the focal point. Practically all are megascale structures in stellar orbits, collecting energy as antimatter for the next time they are to be used. As they are activated, enormous quantities of energy are dumped into the zero point field in order to trigger a vacuum fluctuation and blow up a quantum wormhole. If the process works the result is two wormhole mouths held stable by exotic matter frames. If it fails the least that will happen is a major detonation
Success was finally achieved in 2079 a.t. when the Vega Geodesic Triumvirate succeeded in opening and maintaining a 100-nanometer wormhole indefinitely.
Throughout the Age of Expansion, while experiments were done on wormholes, development was also proceeding on efficient reactionless- drive ships powered by exotic matter cores, this again being based on godtech from friendly archailects. Thus transapient-friendly godtech utilising exotic matter brought about a huge revolution in galactic civilization. It was the beginning of true Sephirotic metaempire and civilization. Which, many claim, is what the archailects had in mind all along.
The minimum toposophic required for a weylforge is a specialized "idiot savant" (by >SI:4 standards) SI:4, but to create a weylforge requires SI:5 (Weylforges are simply "pets" the archailects use). While much of how a weylforge works is comprehensible [see entry on Weylforges] the hypofemtoplancktech core is far beyond the understanding of even the highest transapient or godling. Because it is impractical to tow trillions of tons of exotic matter, the method was developed - still in use today - of using linelayer ships towing a much smaller "guide gate" which is then fitted into the main wormhole structure that has already been assembled in the new star system. The artificial wormhole is then carefully inflated from there.
Linelayers do not really "tow" wormholes (the original reference is obscure, possibly an Empires Era first toposophic toon called [poor baseline translation] Bertie The Linelayer ), but transport a nanogauge or angstrom-sized wormhole mouth in a special container, isolated from the rest of the universe by subquantum fields (to prevent instabilities being caused by the exotic matter nanoframework). While the technology is again godtech, the linelayer Mind emself can be SI:2, or even SI:1, since most of the wormhole maintenance is automated by archailect-created "firmware" [again, poor translation] in the transporting unit.
While most wormhole construction was AI-centric, and on the nano-, micro-, milli-, and more rarely centimeter scale, work at the same time also progressed on creating a navigable wormhole through which a macroscopic entity could pass. Here the biggest problem was in simply finding enough ordinary matter to convert to exotic matter. Even a one meter wormhole required an entire Jupiter worth of mass; a 100 meter wormhole (considered the absolute minimum for decent traffic and commerce) a Sol worth of mass. In a galaxy where every scrap of matter was valuable, this was clearly an impractical solution. Fortunately, a number of further breakthroughs working with godtech derived, actively stabilized, Casimir fields enabled the creation of larger wormholes in which a small amount of exotic matter was able to produce the effect of a much greater quantity. This ushered in the modern age of wormholes, allowing many orders of magnitude in efficiency to be gained, but at the cost of stability. And the more the boundary is pushed, the more unstable things become. The early macroscopic wormholes especially were extraordinarily unstable, and tended to collapse in a burst of deadly gamma radiation (in the Balfour Project at Daj Naml, in 2154 - several thousand sapient and at least a dozen transingularity lives were lost when the 250 meter portal suddenly and inexplicably imploded). Eventually it became possible to create reasonably stable "StarGates" up to several kilometers in diameter, using a relatively modest input of exotic matter. Often brown dwarf mining or sun-lifting was used to provide raw materials. This could create either a larger number of more stable smaller stargates, or a few cantankerous larger ones. An entire industry developed around the custom-grown AIs that were required to juggle the delicate feedback mechanisms and keep the whole thing from imploding.
In any case, during the later Age of Expansion, wormhole construction led to tremendous environmental destruction, with the big powers and megacorporations ravaging uninhabited star systems, mining them for mass which was converted to exotic matter and shipped to various locations where it was used to make more stargates.
By the end of the Age of Establishment, period, this solution was no longer viable, as real estate became more valuable when inhabited than when destroyed. This led directly to the rise of the Sun Miner Culture, who skimmed the vast gaseous layers of stars (cool M-type dwarves were especially favoured).
At the same time, and over the centuries, as archailects and godtech civilizations transcended or lost interest in their wormholes or replaced them with larger and more efficient ones, abandoned wormholes - still with their 'worms' (controlling hyperturing ai) - were added to the Nexus. Many of these were shut down, and tragically some were to be destroyed during the Version War (some paranoid groups blame this on ahuman ai or even on the original archailects themselves). Other 'worms' who weren't destroyed simply decided to have nothing to do with the Nexus and set up their own networks.. The ComEmp saw a period of renewal after the war, but even in the current era the Nexus has not been restored to its former glory. During the ComEmp period, the Sun Miners became especially powerful, and provided most of the exotic matter to build the wormhole and stargate nexus within the inner sphere. The Sun Miners have since schismed into a number of different clades, some actively hostile to each other, and their technology has also been adopted by most of the big powers, which further accelerated their downfall, at least in the Outer Volumes. In the Inner Sphere however the big Sun Miner clades like Helios, Surya, and Prometheus remain a respectable and important part of the interstellar economy.
It is important to bear in mind that the economics of blowing up a wormhole to a macroscopic size are complex. Regardless of what its ultimate size might be, it always requires the same amount of energy and exotic matter to create a wormhole in the first place. Thereafter, expansion of the gateway to whatever size is desired requires the use of a set amount of matter that could always be used for something else. Determining whether or not the investment of matter into a macroscale wormhole is the best long-term use of that matter can be a very involved process. However, the benefit of being able to cross interstellar distances in a moment often weighs heavily in favor of a gateway. This is why many wormholes are macroscopic and not just tiny communications links (among nanoclades and virtual cultures such wormholes are standard, of course, but even they often think that you might sometimes need to move bulk matter and buy standard-sized wormholes just in case).
As galactic society developed with local Federations, Empires, and Dark Ages, the Stargates tended to keep things tied together so a catastrophe would effect everyone - however those empires outside the Stargate nexus would be immune or rather have their own separate dark ages. Also, parts were broken off which could cause local dark ages. For example, in 3694 the Geteche system was attacked by an unusually virulent form of AI-virus, developed by the now long defunct Hyperion-Charlwood. The attack destroyed the local infrastructure and the governing AI, which led to the explosive destruction of all local wormhole buses and links. This broke off most of the links between the Orion Arm and the young colonies in the Perseus arm. While the virus was contained in the Orion arm and the perpetrators harshly punished, the remote colonies all succumbed. For several millennia they were isolated, often barbarous and only gradually reconnected to the main wormhole nexus.
Today at least two dozen polities have the space-time engineering technology required to extract wormholes from the Planck foam. The minimum toposophic required for wormhole technology would seem to be SI:5, and although some say it is also within the capacity of SI:4, these are fourth toposophics that have already been "tweaked" by higher archailects. (obviously not all SI:5 are interested in creating wormholes, and some simply borrow the technology from others who are. Or so it seems to archailectologians. In fact no-one is really sure).
Moving wormholes is possible, and interstellar links are usually laid down using special wormhole transport ships that transport newly opened wormholes from the origin system to their destination. Moving a wormhole through another is possible if done very carefully, but usually it requires at least picotech AI to handle the complex forces and interactions
Macroscopic Wormholes (stargates or starportals) usually look like 100 meter- to multi-kilometer-sized polyhedrons of equipment, with the open faces showing a distorted view of the other end. Usually the gateway is surrounded by massive space installations housing ferries, docking facilities, military defenses, business, traffic control, and maintenance systems. Often these structures grow so large as to dwarf the actual portal itself. In some ways they are like the major international airports of old Earth. But a better analogy would be ancient pre-scientific civilizations, which almost always developed along major sources of commerce and transport (rivers, coastline, etc). Even a small stargate is the source of massive commerce, orbital infrastructure, and entire corporations and clades. The amount of traffic in the form of both data and cargo that pass through a wormhole is boggling to the imagination. Often huge wormhole or stargate cities (the swarm of habitats, depots, warehouses, factories, Known Net and matrix-nodes, etc) spring up around the portal itself, as if oblivious to the danger of collapse, and are more populous then all the rest of the habitats of that star system put together. Fortunately with all the checks and counterchecks and vast in-structure ai ecologies that stabilize them, wormholes today rarely collapse. But during the early days of macroscopic wormholes, building your home on top of a 2-kilometer wormhole terminus really gave a new meaning to the phrase "living dangerously".
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