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  • Let's assume that I managed to create a wormhole, only problem is,that I have to observe it with microscopes (it's so small), but I can keep it open.
  • Also, I have a dyson sphere.
  • I want the power from that dyson sphere to get to me, almost instantenously.
  • I have highly advanced nanobots, that can make any of my microscopic structures, I desired for, to become true, as long as they didn't contradict the laws of physics.
  • I want to ensure that the in the output, the amounts of the energy transported and effinciency are optimalized.
  • I want to use that energy.

Is there a way to make something like this possible in the boundaries of physics, assuming, that traversable wormholes exist?

Mephistopheles
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2 Answers2

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Fire the most powerful laser you can get through it. Use the biggest beam that can be focused with lenses to a focal point at the wormhole.

Sorry for the crude character graphics:

[Laser Beam] ()>.<

{()} = lens

{>} = beam converging

{.} = wormhole

{>} = beam spreading on the other side of the wormhole

{brackets are to keep the editor from eating the < and >}

It doesn't matter if it spreads after going though the wormhole since you probably need to spread the beam out to make it useful. If for some reason you don't want it to spread on the other side, you can use another set of lenses on that end.

You can then spread the beam out to manageable levels and use any numb of methods to capture that energy from steam generation to photo voltaic receivers.

ShadoCat
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  • So, the wormhole is the focus point. – Mephistopheles Mar 14 '17 at 21:01
  • @RedactedRedacted, Exactly! If you want to get fancy, you would run different lasers at different angles but one big laser is what I pictured. – ShadoCat Mar 14 '17 at 21:04
  • I actually worked on these for a story that I'm working on. My wormholes are bigger though they run the whole range. I solved the power problem by floating one end of a wormhole very close to a star and using the heat that comes out the other end for power or thrust. – ShadoCat Mar 14 '17 at 21:06
  • Gravitational lensing? – Mephistopheles Mar 14 '17 at 21:09
  • I was thinking regular lenses. We currently use lenses to focus lasers now. As long as the lens can take the energy density of the laser it will work. If the energy density is too big, spread the beam and use a bigger lens (or go with the multi beam). – ShadoCat Mar 14 '17 at 21:12
  • I was just interested in , how would this affect the lasers. – Mephistopheles Mar 15 '17 at 08:25
  • That is a good point. The light will come out rather spread out, especially given how tiny your wormhole is. You might want your solar cells in the full sphere around the receiving end. – John Dvorak Mar 15 '17 at 13:39
  • @RedactedRedacted, Not at all. You don't need a coherent image at the other side, just a volume of energy. Sending a cow through a meat grinder works if all you need is hamburger and not the cow. – ShadoCat Mar 15 '17 at 17:42
  • @JanDvorak, I think a hemisphere would do it since I don't think the light will bend to behind the opening. Actually better would be a parabolic receiver. The energy density will probably be higher in the center of the beam and you want to give that section more room to spread out to manageable densities. – ShadoCat Mar 15 '17 at 17:46
  • @ShadoCat Oh, ok. Fun fact: this question was an experiment to create something similar to the S2 engines or the cores from NGE, and it worked, because While the characters consistently refer to the core as "koa" ("core"), the term koukyuu (光球) is sometimes observed in print. Koukyuu means "photosphere" ("a sphere of light or radiance") So yeah :) thx. – Mephistopheles Mar 15 '17 at 17:48
  • @RedactedRedacted & JanDvorak, if the wormhole can be traversed from both sides, you can shoot laser beams into both sides of the sender wormhole and put collectors on both sides of the receiver wormhole. That will get your "photosphere" though it really should be elongated into two parabolic receivers (looking more like a US football). – ShadoCat Mar 15 '17 at 17:50
  • Grumble, mumble, they put the enter key too close to the shift key. – ShadoCat Mar 15 '17 at 17:55
  • @ShadoCat Renders suggest that the light would mostly come out in one direction, but why should none of it come out in the opposite direction of the primary beam? – John Dvorak Mar 15 '17 at 18:00
  • @JanDvorak, see above. I figured out a way to use spherical receivers. AFAIK, wormholes are one side in and one side out. If that's not the case, things will get messy for the story I'm writing. – ShadoCat Mar 15 '17 at 18:04
  • speaking of parabolic mirrors - just put your wormhole in the focus of a parabolic mirror, and the powering beam will be mostly exiting in one direction. – John Dvorak Mar 15 '17 at 18:04
  • @ShadoCat nah, a real wormhole is more like a funnel through 4D space, like two black holes connected together (and causes just as much lensing). You can't just make a square cut in the fabric of spacetime and glue it to a square cut somewhere else. The spacetime doesn't like that, plus the back side of the portal would have nothing connecting to it, which would cause all sorts of weird issues. Well, unless you do manage to pull that off, in which case it neatly solves the nagging issue of passing humans through curved space-time without making too much mess of their internal organs. – John Dvorak Mar 15 '17 at 18:13
  • @JanDvorak, Yeah, I overcome this by making my wormholes vastly oversized and use the relatively small stabilized portion in the center. Needless to say, a wormhole that can safely send a human through is very expensive to hold open. – ShadoCat Mar 15 '17 at 18:23
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You've got quite a lot of handwaving going on, so a little more shouldn't hurt.

I recently came across this fun little question on Physics.SE: Will the Large Hadron Collider “explode” if the power is turned up too high? It, it offered a fantastic link: Protecting the LHC From Itself. It turns out that when you have 350MJ of beam energy, the energy of a speeding fright train, you have to figure out what to do when the beam does something you didn't want.

When the time comes, the beams are extracted, or dumped, into two huge cylindrical blocks. Eight meters long, one meter in diameter, and made of graphite composites encased in concrete, they are the only thing that can withstand the full power of the beam. But first the beam has to be diffused, because in its compressed form it would drill a hole tens of meters long in any material.

So as the beams pass out of the LHC, they spread out and hit the blocks in a shape that resembles a cursive “e.” The dump takes just eighty-millionths of a second, dilutes the energy of the beam by a factor of 100,000 and heats the center of the lines that make up the “e” to almost 700°C.

I point all of this out because it seems to be the current limits of what we can do with massive expensive machinery. That seems like a good starting point for your nanomachines carried by every solider on a battlefield.

The LHC's goal is to be able to focus all of that beam energy on a 65um circle. Your comments suggest 5nm is your goal, so to be fair let's convert the LHC's beam width into nanometers: 65000nm. This means the area of your wormhole is about 1/169000000th the diameter of the LHC beam.

Plugging these together, 350MJ / 169000000 = 2J. Wait a sec, that's not the units you wanted. That's the energy which passes past the LHC's focal point every time the protons pass around their racetracks. You don't want energy, you want power, so we need to factor time into this. As it turns out, the bunches of protons cross once every 25ns, or 40000000 time a second.

What does this mean? It means that if you want to transmit 2J every 25ns, you'll transmit 80MW. This means that, if you think you need to transport 80MW, the conditions of the wormhole are going to be comparable to that of the core of the LHC where we smash things together with such ferocity that we can peer into the inner fundamentals of material itself. At 80MW, you're going to want to have safeguards on the order of the LHC's massive 8 ton steel bricks which soak up the energy from its superconducting magnets. My general recommendation would be to retain a healthy safety margin away from this point. 1MW is probably much healthier.

Alternatively, since your goal is a beam weapon, just don't bother catching the beam and converting it back to energy. Just use it directly:

In 2003, two-thirds of the superconducting magnets in the Tevatron’s six-kilometer ring quenched at the same time. The beam drilled a hole in one collimator and created a 30-centimeter groove in another.

Cort Ammon
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  • Using the beam directly won't be easy. Such a tiny wormhole will turn your beam into a diffuse sphere of light around the receiving end. – John Dvorak Mar 15 '17 at 13:49
  • Well.. not exactly a sphere, most of it will come in one direction, but it still won't be as focused as it would shooting through empty space. A parabolic mirror would be advisable. – John Dvorak Mar 15 '17 at 18:29