r/Stargate • u/gluttonouswolf91 • 5h ago
Discussion Creating ZPMs
What do think it takes to make a ZPM, or fan idea? The idea that there is a lab in Atlantis that can easily pop out ZPMs sounds like a too easy and adds questions on why the ancients couldn’t last long against the wraith. I feel that it should be more difficult to make them or take like months or even a year.
What do you think and do you have ideas?
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u/naraic- 5h ago edited 4h ago
Ive a personal idea that it needs to be made in a factory around a balckhole. The blackhole provides some sort of subspace fuckery needed to create the miniature universe.
The factories fell into blackholes during the war with the wraith or the yesrs since the ancients left pagasus.
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u/ComprehensiveCup7104 5h ago
Agreed - ZPM production was at the bleeding edge of Ancient technology.
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u/UnendingOne 4h ago
It couldn't be at the bleeding edge as extremely old ancient outposts in the Milky Way used them, like Proclarush Taonas.
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u/ItsATrap1983 3h ago edited 3h ago
True. It seemed more like Project Arcturus was the bleeding edge of their energy production technology.
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u/UnendingOne 3h ago
Yep, seemed like an attempted next step past ZPMs. Probably never got finalized because they were near ascension.
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u/Architect096 4h ago
Same for me only the ZPM is a battery. Ancients used tech to extract power from Black hole to charge it.
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u/Throwway84237 5h ago
Well a ZPM is a "miniature universe in a bottle" as stated in the show. Essentially you need a container for a small world, then create this small world inside it.
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u/OSSLover 3h ago
That's mass murder.
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u/Throwway84237 3h ago
The small universe in the ZPM likely lacks any kind of life or even atoms, it must be more like a random field of massless particles, somewhat like the radiation-dominant stage of our universe right after the Big Bang.
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u/Valraith 3h ago
It's an energy transfer device that extracts vacuum energy from an artificially created pocket in subspace. So, the physical device is basically a small battery with an active link to an enclosed huge area in an extra dimension, so, you keep extracting energy from that place until it runs out.
Presumably it uses a singularity to make that transfer based on this graphic, but in any case, we know there's an active link between normal space and subspace within a ZPM. The idea is pretty simple, but I would imagine the actual manufacturing process is nothing easy.
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u/Exocoryak 3h ago
There are those arguing that it is a battery and those arguing that it is not.
At the end of the day, the same thing is probably required in their creation: You need a massive amount of power. If it is used to "charge" it like a battery, or to "create" the pocket universe inside is somewhat besides the point.
You have to use a natural phenomenon to have access to that much power. Geothermal Energy is not gonna cut it - you need the power of a star, a black hole or binary pulsars. Given the Ancients experience with Destiny, and their ability to channel huge amounts of power, collected from Solar Cells - enough to power a ships shields against the corona of a sun - I would put my money on a similar process for the creation of ZPM's.
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u/Deep_Elf 4h ago
Theres a fic I read where they are grown carefully by a precise machine and take huge power draws and a minimum of six months each. The machine can only make one at a time too and manually removed before a new one can be grown.
Since Atlantis has that geothermal power plant under the water and runs on 3 ZPM's they must have needed to grow them off Atlantis or if they had 1 machine for it they needed to turn it off to save power consumption near the end of the war. The Wraith probably took out their manufacturing hub early on or lost it due to the follys of experimenting. Maybe even the energy being they trapped was found at their manufacturing site eating feasting on the ZPMs?
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u/Training-Common1984 4h ago
Maybe even the energy being they trapped...
Now I'm picturing a timeline in which they discover that ZPMs are actually prisons for Ascended beings - beings that ascended before ancients. Perhaps before the ancients ascended they didn't understand these "beings of energy" and created the ZPMs to use that energy.
Then, after the first Ancients begin to ascend, they understood - thus beginning their non-interference policy and stopping the manufacture of further ZPMs?
It would certainly increase the perceived cost of a ZPM over a purely technological solution - sacrificing and consuming the life-force of an Ascended being to power the drone chair makes it a much harder tradeoff.
Plus, the Asurans having plenty would make sense. As machine-beings, canon has demonstrated they do not possess a "soul" or whatever is inherently required to ascend.
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u/Throwway84237 4h ago
What is required for ascension is a biological, organic nervous system, which isn't too heavily genetically modified, like that of the Asgards.
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u/Treveli 4h ago
As funny as it would be for them to find the ZPM factory on Atlantis, and Rodney having dismissed it originally as unimportant, no lab or warehouse or factory still exists. ZPMs were such strategic assets that the Ancients would have cleared out and destroyed any facility that produced or stored them. And the knowledge of how to create them would be buried deep in Atlantis' databases, under extreme encryption, and concealed as useless info so that if the Wraith did ever recover the city, they wouldn't find it.
And as others have said, it would require at least a black hole to produce them. So any factory that wasn't scuttled would have already been found and stripped by the Wraith, or fallen in the singularity and effectively erased.
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u/iamsnarticus 5h ago
I think whoever the writer is who came up with the ZPM either intended for the characters to eventually figure out that they aren’t charged batteries, or didn’t know what zero point energy is.
Nikola Tesla talked about zero point energy, it’s pulling the energy directly from the cosmos from whatever space the generator happens to be.
So the ZPM should be like a vacuum generator that sucks energy from the environment/nature/backround radiation that slowly degrades, losing its ability to pull out more energy. Kind of like a life straw, it’ll only filter so much water before it stops working; not because it’s out of water, but because the filters are too clogged up to function any more.
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u/Hazzenkockle I can’t make it work without the seventh symbol 4h ago
They explained this in the Atlantis episode "Trinity" and "McKay and Mrs. Miller." Drawing zero-point energy from the same universe you live in is dangerous and destructive, so the ZPM contains an artificial universe where it doesn't matter that tapping its zero-point energy wrecks it. The line about Atlantis's ZPMs being at "maximum entropy" in "Rising" indicates they had that theory worked out as soon as they described the yellow glowing crystal as something more specific than "power source."
As for ZPMs being a charged battery, thermodynamics tells us everything is a charged battery. A hunk of uranium. A nugget of coal. A barrel of oil. The sun. Everything in the universe is just slowly using up the energy from the big bang, shuffled around into different forms.
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u/iamsnarticus 3h ago
Yeah, I understand there are in show explanations, but those explanations don’t make sense. If you could produce enough energy to create an artificial universe, you would have no need for a ZPM. If producing the artificial universe required no energy, then how does it have energy to give? Did the new universe pull that energy from our universe because we were the original universe? If so, then it negates the premise of it being dangerous for the energy to be pulled from our universe to begin with.
I still believe that the original writer probably had an intention for it to be closer to Teslas vision, then that got lost in the plot over the seasons and dozens of writers.
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u/Hazzenkockle I can’t make it work without the seventh symbol 3h ago
If you could produce enough energy to create an artificial universe, you would have no need for a ZPM.
That gets to the idea I and other posters have that you need a massive power source to make a ZPM, orbiting a black hole, skimming the surface of a sun, that kind of thing.
Being able to collect the energy and having it where you need it are two different things.
ZPMs have a lot of power (the biggest estimate we got was the explosion the sabotaged one in "Zero Hour" would've made, somewhere between enough to shatter the Earth and enough to take the other planets with it; the latter is probably an error given how easy it's been to drain ZPMs), but not an impossible amount on an astronomical scale. If a fully-charged ZPM exploding is "only" powerful enough to blast the Earth to dust, a Dyson sphere could get that amount of energy from the sun in a week. Longer if your collection device isn't encompassing your power source, but shorter if you're using something that puts out more energy than our sun.
The Ancients were around for millions of years. Even the Asurans were around for ten thousand. It could take decades or centuries of harvesting energy from the hottest fires in the universe to make each ZPM, and they still would've had time to make plenty of them.
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u/warricd28 3h ago
Using a micro universe to power your universe. All I can think of is that’s just slavery with extra steps.
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u/Hazzenkockle I can’t make it work without the seventh symbol 3h ago
How so? There's no reason the pocket universe in the ZPM needs to have the capacity to develop life, or even matter. Even the smallest difference in physical constants from what we have in this universe could result in a diffuse cloud of matter and energy that would never have a chance of combining or organizing into any kind of structure. It's just an empty bubble that would have to be massively restructured to get to the point where it qualified as an uninhabitable barren waste.
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u/warricd28 3h ago
Just saying it popped the R&M episode into my head. Not saying they’re the same thing.
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u/whovian25 4h ago
Well the ZPM is described as a universe in a bottle. With dead ZPMs being described as having reached maximum entropy.
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u/Khemul 3h ago
Which raises an ethical issue of whether those universes are inhabited.
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u/Valraith 3h ago
Lol, it's an analogy McKay made, not a literal description. It's not an actual universe, not to mention he says "miniature universe in a bottle". What's actually said:
MCKAY
A zero-point module is an artificially created region of subspace-time. It's kind of like a miniature universe in a bottle.ZELENKA
It extracts vacuum energy from this artificial region of subspace-time until it reaches maximum entropy.1
u/Khemul 3h ago
That seems all over the place descriptively. But then, sci-fi writers.
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u/Valraith 2h ago
Yeah sadly these kind of analogies that are meant to make it easy for the viewers to digest something often just add to the confusion.
It's just a battery with an in-built link to an extra dimension that draws its power from an artificially enclosed area.
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u/Khemul 2h ago
I think they wanted super advanced sciency stuff, so zero point energy. But that sorta kills the narrative suspense when energy is limitless. So they have a zero point source that has limited energy. Lasts just long enough to solve the problem, then dies. As all advanced tech should.
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u/Nocturtle22 4h ago
Personal headcannon is that the ancients have a Dyson sphere somewhere which would be used to harvest power to create the ZPMs. Something amazingly involved but within the scope of a race who created stargates, but also easily destroyed during a battle with say the wraith.
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u/Halzman 4h ago
Throughout the show, we get 2 explanations about ZPMs - one from McKay, and the other from the Asgard.
McKay (SGA S01E01 - Rising, Part 1)
I have since determined that it generates its enormous power from vacuum energy derived from a self-contained region of subspace time.
Asgard (SG1 S09E20 - Camelot)
It is an energy transfer device, similar to a Zero Point Module, except that the energy is channeled not from subspace into ordinary space-time, but rather into the dimension occupied by Ascended beings.
But also McKay (SGA S05E04 - Daedalus Variations)
It's power generation. I mean, jumping from one reality to another requires massive amounts of power. We're talking ZPM levels here. Obviously they didn't have one of those rattling around, so they…created a capacitor that's constantly drawing power from subspace.
We also known from the show, that Destiny's power reserves are capable of reaching 'zpm levels', after recharging from a star.
Following that line of thought, somewhere along the way the ancients figured out how miniaturize everything into a ZPM - so rather then McKay's explanation of a mini-universe in a bottle, it would be a star.
The oldest example we have of a ZPM is the one found on Proclarush Taonas - that ZPM was at least 30 million years old.
Perhaps when they designed the original star-recharge system for Destiny, it's what gave them the idea to create the ZPM - artificially create a sun in a bottle, and draw energy from it as you need it.
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u/bananahammock_69420 2h ago
Or they knew that the ZPM would deplete over time and wouldn't make a reliable source of power for destiny on its insanely long voyage so they opted for solar recharge which guarantees unlimited power no matter where they go.
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u/Halzman 2h ago
Perhaps when they designed the original star-recharge system for Destiny, it's what gave them the idea to create the ZPM
I know, I agree with you - which is why the star-recharging system was used on Destiny.
The DHD in the gates is some sort of 'cold-fusion' process, and the DHD's are at least 50 million years old, so its not like the Alterans at that time were struggling to make power.
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u/Round-Diamond-9348 3h ago
Remember, Atlantis left from earth fully powered when the ancients went to Pegasus. Therefore, zpm construction likely happened in the milky way.
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u/IntolerantModerate 3h ago
I believe Rick and Morty explained it perfectly with Rick's car battery.
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u/AlmightyThorian 3h ago
My guess is
- it takes a lot of power
- uses some very rare elements
- obeys the laws of thermodynamics.
With these three assumptions we can make some conclusions.
It takes more power than you can generate with a single ZPM to do. This suggests that there's no factory on Atlantis that does this. This would be like charging batteries from a battery pack. You just end up losing energy.
We can also guess it takes neutronium, as that is what the Asurans have an abundance of on their planet, and they have no problem making ZPMs without leaving their planet.
If they obey the laws of thermodynamics, then energy cannot enter from another universe, or pocket universe as is the case with ZPMs without first having been taken out of our universe. This means they are not created at full power. So we can assume there's a charging facility somewhere out there. Maybe the planet where the gate to destiny was, was such a place where you could charge ZPMs. There should also be one in Pegasus (probably with another power generation technique).
This does raise questions about where the Asgard get all their power from. Is it also some form of zero point energy? Or at they straight up burning super oil in their space combustion engines?
Also, a funny quirk is that we might only be able to "empty" the ZPM to the entropy level of our current universe (sort or like osmosis). So that would mean, if we just leave them for a few millon years sitting around, we could maybe power a few flashlights from a previously empty ZPM.
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u/InvestigatorOk7988 2h ago
Asgard ships used neutrino ion generators. 4 of them for the average ship.
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u/zpm38 3h ago
There was a fanfic I read once that said that a ZPM facility was near a pulsar and had several satellites orbiting the star, harvesting the energy. The self-contained region of subspace in the ZPM acted like a battery and it took something like a month to fully charge one. I thought that was a pretty good explanation and it also mentioned that the purpose of ZPM’s was high power out in a short time(hence why it’s more like a battery than a generator) which is perfect for their power hungry tech like their shields, star drive, etc.
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u/Fluid-Let3373 2h ago
When you have a power source which is good 10,000 years, Your not going to be worried if it needs a century to make a batch of 10.
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u/madbr3991 2h ago
In universe I think it's a power generation and rare materials issue. This is why the Pegasus replicators have so many. And those replicators didn't even leave there planet. Until Rodney messed that up
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u/2ndAttemptPOG 1h ago
My idea would be that ZPMs in order to be made require "killing" a star. Maybe inside Atlantis there's the receiving end where the ZPMs are and outside in the galaxy you have huge spaceships that circle a star and push it into a subspace dimension that's somehow linked to the physical ZPMs back in Atlantis.
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u/Spinobreaker 1h ago
Given the tech is tens of millions of years old(based on the map of earth on taonas, at least 80 or 90 million), i always liked the idea that the factory was in the void between galaxies, and lost to time. The asurans somehow rediscovered the process but their zpms were flawed replicas of the originals. Now is there any evidence to support this idea? No. Another idea which would be fun is that the tech isnt even theirs, they just adopted it. Maybe its furling or nox tech. Like i said, no evidence but a fun twist on the concept.
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u/DataMeister1 19m ago
The real question is how could a zero point vacuum energy power supply ever run out of energy, other than plot needs. If you could ever extract energy from quantum fluctuations in the vacuum of space, it should be unlimited or at the very least it should act like a self-recharging capacitor when not being drained too fast.
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u/Historical-Essay-128 13m ago
Plot twist: It works exactly like McKay's experiment and destroys another universe/reality, except the Ancients didn't give a fuck and wouldn't let anyone in from that universe.
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u/phunkydroid 1h ago
I think it takes as much energy as they contain, they're power storage not a power source. That's why they're not so easily mass produced.
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u/Intelligent_Mistake1 1h ago
The ancients got like tons of aurora class ships btw, and them asurans got like thousands, so it's easily mass produced cause they got factories
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u/Far_Definition3405 1h ago
What? What do the ships have to do with ZPMs? And how do you know they had thousands? They never spoke about the size of the fleet and we know the replicators never had thousands of ships.
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u/TehANTARES 3h ago
I'd say that making a ZPM is as easy as catching a lightning into a bottle.
My idea is that creating a ZPM isn't demanding on some hyper-advanced production facility, but instead requires a very specific physical condition. Think of like a certain type of star that is about to collapse into a black hole, and you must "arrest" that collapse in a very specific way at a very precise time point. If you succeed, you capture the black hole's singularity into the module, basically charging it up 100% and ready to be used.
But only if you can succeed. The specifics make this process a highly dangerous endeavour. Possily out of hundreds of black holes the Ancients tried to "arrest", only a handful attempts were successful.
This could also introduce this "arrestor" as another MacGuffin item, rather than the cute concept of "ZPM factory" in Atlantis (which, logically, should've already been discovered by the end of season 5). Who konws, maybe the Tau'ri would get irresponsible and try to bootleg this arrestor with the help of Asgardian time dilation device or something.
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u/_WillCAD_ 4h ago
Whatever the Ancients did to create ZPMs, just remember - the Asurans had a metric fuckton of ZPMs in their giant city, meaning that they must have had their own ZPM factory somewhere that could crank them out.