Oh, sweet liberty above—so, you know that big space hole that Helldivers 2 players accidentally tore open back in June of last year? Firstly, stop giggling at the phrase ‘big space hole’, it’s undemocratic.
Secondly, I officially rescind my advice to stop worrying about it, because the Illuminate are, uh, moving it. Towards Super Earth. They’re trying to take the thing and just… dunk it into our planet like a basketball. I think we have made some mistakes.
That’s as per an in-game invasion campaign, which is distinct from a Major Order in that it’s happening in the background, splitting the troop’s attention between the front and the ‘there is a wormhole approaching our home planet’ thing.
At the time of writing, the planets Alathfar XI and Propus are sites where the Illuminate is “generating dark energy, which they are using to move the Meridian Singularity towards super earth”. The galactic map also has an ominous bar to really drive the point home.
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Also, mostly unrelated to the news, the last time I played Helldivers 2 I logged out on top of this thing, and while my Star Destroyer was still attached to it like a barnacle clamped to a whale, the outside of my space window was an ominous jet black.
I’m trying not to think too hard about the implications of having my ship towed halfway across the galaxy on the Illuminate’s dime. Still, it does beg the question—can you actually move a wormhole? Like, in real life? Well, you might be surprised to find out that a Staff Writer for PC Gamer is not a physicist. I have no idea.
However, Forbes contributor Paul M. Sutter had a lot to say on what a wormhole is and why it’s a bad idea to travel through one back in 2019. Mainly that they probably don’t, uh, exist, because “in order to stabilize a wormhole, you have to counteract the effects of any positive energy or mass flowing down the tunnel … to counteract positive mass you need negative mass. That’s right: negative mass.”
Sutter goes on to explain that it’d be like “kicking a ball and sending it flying in the opposite direction. Or setting a negative mass particle next to a positive mass particle and watching them accelerate off to infinity, violating the conservation of momentum. It’s just such a nonsensical topic that most physicists don’t even touch it with a ten-foot positive-mass pole.” The Illuminate clearly don’t have such scruples.
While this thing’s confirmed to be a wormhole, not a black hole, as per in-game lore, I’d still however like to share this conversation from the Physics Stack Exchange I found in my cursory Googling, because I think it’s very funny.
User107153 writes: “If you can move a planet, or a star, you can move a black hole: You just bring some other mass near it and gravity does the rest.” To which someone else replies: “Could a black hole be moved by a laser fired into it?” That’s a goddamn blue-blooded Super Earth patriot right there. Now we just need to invent a laser with negative mass.