Portal Dumbness

I've been under the weather, so the wife fired up an old BBC series we hadn't seen that had portals and dinosaurs in it. I'm a sucker for dinosaurs. But the show also had dumb people. And I'm annoyed at that. Hopefully you'll be entertained

You come across a portal looking thing in the woods. What do you do? Stick your head in it to see what’s on the other side. This is a good way to get decapitated, or asphyxiated, or any number of horrible things if it turns out not to be a simple, friendly portal. Instead, when you see a glowy weirdness that defies your mundane experience, toss a pebble in. See if comes out the behind the portal or bounces back. If it disappears, you’ve might have a portal.

Next, take a long stick, and push the tip into the yawning gap in reality, while hanging on from the far end. If if you feel a strong tug to pull more in, let go. Assuming you still have the stick in hand, pull it back out. Is the end of the stick intact? Or was it disintegrated? Now

imagine that was your head.

Now at this point, you might have a genuine portal on your hands. Cool. Go watch all ten seasons of Star Gate SG-1. Is the portal still there? This takes care of two problems. You’ve established that the portal is seemingly stable, and hopefully learned some tips from a fictional sci-fi show about all the horrible things that go wrong with portals.

We’re ready to go into the portal!

Stop!

Seriously, did you really watch all ten seasons of SG-1? Did you setup monitoring of the portal in case anything bad came through? How about security teams to handle such trouble? And to keep annoying looky-loo’s out? Do you have a wired or wires remote control vehicle to send through? A camera on a stick? Did you check for radiation? For all you know this the other end of this thing orbits a dying neutron star. Which means you’d get radiation sickness, asphyxiate and float away from the portal.

Assuming you’ve ordered some Geigers, Go-Pros, hazmat suits off the internet, and used a counter to check if there’s radiation, stuck a Go-Pro on a stick and peeked around, and sent a small lab animal through in a cage. It seems safe to step through in the immediate area. Now what?

I hope you waited long enough to quarantine test the lab animal. And gave it a healthy number of treats because that was a dick move sending it first. But now you know it’s kind of safe for you to go.

Let’s step through—wait!

Did you pack a few days rations? Radios? Utility knife. Gun. Some ammo. Do you have a military trained friend? If you’re not violence based, bring someone who is, but who can also not go

shooting on first sight.

Rope yourselves off to something on your side. Go through the portal. Are you still alive? Look around. Test the radio and confirm they can hear you back on your side. Take pictures. All around, including the sky. Now go back to return home through the portal.

Assuming the rope didn’t get cut, and you didn’t die, and you actually returned to where you came from, you have a seemingly stable portal. You wore the hazmat suits right?

Portals are dangerous business, and the reason there’s no stories about those inherent dangers is because few people want to read gobs of flash fiction about protagonists dying within moments of discovering and trying a portal isn’t as exciting as discovering new worlds and being the stranger who manages to save a people.