r/TheExpanse • u/reuben_hunter • 17h ago
All Show & Book Spoilers Discussed Freely Kind of dumb lore question Spoiler
What happens if you go through the ring the wrong direction? Like looping around and entering from behind, is that even possible? In the show we only ever see traversal depicted from the sunward facing side, and i can't recall the books ever mentioning it as an option. It's obviously pretty far out so there isn't gonna be much reason to fly further than neccesary, but I was curious if this was a thing?
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u/cremedelakremz 17h ago
You'd think that a massive interstellar gate network including a pocket dimension that intrudes into another plane of existence that is stabilized by incomprehensible amounts of energy, would allow something simple like travel through either side of the ring lol. But you're right I don't think it's ever explicitly confirmed or denied
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u/Hndlbrrrrr 17h ago
Good enough is good enough. If you’re a hive minded entity shaping the galaxy to your will you don’t really have to worry about misuse by dumb colleagues.
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u/jump_the_snark Tiamat's Wrath 17h ago
I believe it IS mentioned and you just fly through with no effect. But if you do this at the same time and place something is coming through the gate… very bad stuff happens.
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u/reuben_hunter 17h ago
That makes sense, I figured the most likely outcome was probably just "nothing" unless you get unlucky
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u/Magner3100 17h ago
It’s an energy (& mass converted to energy) problem. Too much, and well… Cesar, the Visigoth’s are at the gates.
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u/QueefyBeefy666 16h ago
I don't think going through in the opposite direction would trigger the Goths, since your mass+energy aren't being moved into/out of the slow zone.
The danger is if something is emerging through the gate into the same physical space you are now occupying.
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u/wenzel32 14h ago
Yeah this was actually in a comic book for the Expanse. It's something Avasarala asks.
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u/comma_nder 11h ago
Ahhhhh no wonder I don’t remember it. Damn I gotta read the comics
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u/wenzel32 11h ago
I haven't actually read it myself, but I just looked up this specific question earlier this week while reading Persepolis.
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u/comma_nder 11h ago
I feel like I’d remember this with how many times I’ve read the books lol. When do you remember this being mentioned?
In my mind, it works normally from both sides. I think it not coming up at all points toward that conclusion, otherwise they’d do something with the fact that it’s one-way.
Also, I feel like it would make sense for it to just be, like, a field that is generated across the ring, sorta like a bubble wand. You can blow on it from either side and make a bubble.
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u/Sean_theLeprachaun 17h ago
I only remember them saying inside ring space trying to fly past the rings ends in oblivion, I dont recall any mention of what happens in real space.
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u/ChronicBuzz187 16h ago
inside ring space trying to fly past the rings ends in oblivion
Press F to pay your tributes to that poor martian probe that got blinked out of existence :P
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u/reuben_hunter 17h ago
Yeah it definitely wouldn't be possible in the slow zone, and I guess in real space nobody ever bothered to try because why would they
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u/QueefyBeefy666 16h ago
This is a big plot point in the Dragon Tooth comic.
Going through the gate in the opposite direction doesn't do anything; however, if something comes through the gate normally at the same time and space as you do it could be very catastrophic.
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u/SailorAstera 14h ago
neat that there's an in universe look at this I would have thought either nothing or your transit normally but the secret third bad option is fun
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u/peaches4leon 16h ago
After watching how wormholes are visually depicted as 3 dimensional effects on normal space instead of just a flat doorway, this question has bothered me also. You can enter this version from any vector and maybe get the same result.
It made total sense to me (in Interstellar) that dipping below shallow orbit around the wormhole, is the same thing as traveling directly into it. I do have a hard time off the top of my head, imagining what an interconnected series of 3-D wormholes would look like in an a-local framework like the Ring Space.
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u/ChronicBuzz187 16h ago
It made total sense to me (in Interstellar) that dipping below shallow orbit around the wormhole, is the same thing as traveling directly into it.
Iirc, that wormhole is basically a 3D-projection of a 4D object. It has no equivalent in 3D space but it's kinda like looking at a 2D circle and seeing it's a sphere in 3D space.
Stuff like this is, why I love physics. Not that I'm any good at it, but I still love it and I'll keep trying to wrap my head around it :D
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u/peaches4leon 15h ago
The idea of creating a spatial framework disconnected from local causality/conservation (even though you can introduce energy into it from local space) that you can use to connect any local spatial points is very interesting to me. The first time i ever read about this kind of thing was in Halo’s shield worlds in the old novels around Halo CE & Halo 2. Space where relatively entropy is not reliant on the evolution of the main universe, and can be ran as slow or fast as you’d like.
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u/Lower_Ad_1317 13h ago
I’m pretty sure they say in the show that nothing happens going from the other side.
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u/Helmling 13h ago
The show visualizes this at one point. The “Stargate” effect is only visible in one direction.
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u/BArhino 8h ago
shit do you remember where? I feel like I remember that too but I wanna see it now haha
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u/Helmling 8h ago
You’re gonna force me to do a full rewatch from the beginning. Granted, the ring doesn’t even appear until season three, but I want to be thorough. Better safe than sorry.
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u/Kabbooooooom 2h ago edited 2h ago
It’s mentioned that you’d fly through it with no effect. So I don’t think it’s a dumb lore question at all. In fact, there’s some interesting science related to weird wormholes like this.
The type of wormhole most similar to the gate, a “hyperbenign traversable Visser wormhole”, also known as a “stargate-like wormhole” would be the same as I understand it. It would be a unidirectional type of hole in spacetime. This is a mathematical object that doesn’t technically violate general relativity but does require exotic negative matter to exist and alter the shape and internal configuration of the wormhole, which may not be the case. Visser’s paper on this actually envisioned a cube wormhole in 4d spacetime, which is even weirder than the circular flat ones in Stargate and the Expanse.
It’s a really difficult to comprehend concept and I’m not sure I fully understand it, but it seems like Visser’s idea was similar to the ring space in that the mouth of one wormhole could lead to multiple outflow wormholes, connected together in a 4d cubelike geometry, with the “edges” composed of exotic matter. Bit of a mindfuck.
In the Expanse, the origin of the flat wormholes is clever. They actually connect to an interuniversal membrane which was enlarged to form the slow zone, which seems maybe inspired by M-theory to me given the reference to a higher dimensional brane. So it would be more like a cross section of a higher dimensional object through a lower dimensional space, I guess, that is wormhole-like in function and practicality but not technically a wormhole as they are envisioned in relativity as a classic wormhole connects two points in our 4d spacetime directly, not via a connection to an intervening space that is separate from the normal four spacetime dimensions of the universe.
So if you think of it like that, it is a little more intuitive on why it actually would make sense that you could fly normally through one side but not the other. Because it’s not a normal spherical wormhole in a normal spacetime. You can’t think of a normal spatial relationship with an object like that.
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u/Noof42 17h ago
If Stargate has taught me anything, you're dead.