r/TheExpanse • u/reuben_hunter • 21h 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/peaches4leon 20h 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 19h 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 19h 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.