How long would it take to get 6 billion people through a Stargate?

[Pika...]

Just a curiosity I was hoping anyone good with logistic and human resources and whatever else might know.

It might eventually relate to to my D&D games depending on how bad the PCs mess up, but that is yet to be seen.

[GoC]

In reality you'll only get a few thousand through before the panic is so great that the stargate becomes blocked with bodies and all organization collapses.

[Prime32]

There's usually a limit on how long a Stargate can be kept open, so you'd need multiple diallings, and I wonder how many people would be killed trying to enter the initial "eruption".

[KnightDisciple]

There's usually a limit on how long a Stargate can be kept open, so you'd need multiple diallings, and I wonder how many people would be killed trying to enter the initial "eruption".

I believe it's 35 minutes or so, as far as "time it can stay open" is concerned.

[GoC]

Whatever the answer it will be measured in years.

[Weezer]

I have no idea how long it would actually take but if 1000 people could pass through per minute it would take 11.44 years to move that many people. Since theres no way you could get 1000 people through a stargate in just a minute it seems like it would be far to long to be an effective means of evacuation. I assumed you're talking about an evacuation because moving planet sized groups of people and "PC's screwing up" seems to indicate planet wide apocalypse and last ditch evac plans.

[shadzar]

Giving each person 1 second and only 1 second, and if the gate could remain open, it would take over 190 years. :smallsmile:

[Randel]

I think that with six billion then it becomes one of those impossible things that you can't really do because of people constantly growing old or having children that the population grows faster than you can send them through the stargate.


But anyway, assuming you can move three people abreast through the stargate each second (which would be pretty impossible unless you could mind-control all of them into perfectly timed soldiers or something) then you could send 259,200 people thorough the gate in one 24 hour day.

Even then it would take 23,149 days of people marching through it non-stop. Or about 63 and a half years.

So yeah, you would have to basically take over the world, make roads and pathways all across the globe, and set up some kind of system to sort people by age, gender and occupation to conceivably evacuate the human population through one stargate.


If you want to send as many people through as possible, you would want to send mostly women first, primarily those of marrying age or who are already pregnant. That way, they will be on the other side when they have children (every person born on Earth would be another person you have to march through the gate. Every person born on the other side... no problem).

You would then try to select the best and brightest people of all occupations so that they could start building civilization on the other side so that the people you send through don't die horribly of starvation or whatnot (yeah, adding stuff like equipment and supplies to the stuff you have to send through the stargate would make it even more impossible to send everyone through)

Plus, realistically there will be people who don't want to leave or can't due to circumstances. There are also the crimminals, the sick, people who have belief systems that would make it even more difficult to set up a camp on the other side (if they can't get along with their neighbors enough to stop trying to kill the then do the human race a favor and don't try marching them through a stargate with 6 billion other people).

Speaking of which, there will probably be all sorts of problems that will get in your way... like rich people who want to get through the gate first (assuming you are evacuating Earth to avoid some disaster), terrorists who want to use the gate for their own purposes, terrorists who just want to kill lots of people, scientists who want to use the gate for something else and don't like the idea of waiting 60 or infinity years for everyone to go through.

Also, depending on how you prioritise who gets to go through then there will be people who want to go through faster... if you try sending women and children first through the gate then you'll have a human population running out of women and children. That could put all sorts of socioeconomic problems into play... if the world is going to end then are you sending mostly American and Western civilization people through... but what if the world isn't coming to an end and the enemies of america take this opportunity to start making demands. How are you going to defend your country when most of your population is being sent to another planet.

Of course, there will also be people claiming that this thing isn't a 'Stargate' and it isn't sending people to another planet. Its just another holocaust and you are systematically killing people for evil purposes... and of course all the time you spend showing them that the gate works is time you aren't sending people through.


So yeah, it would be impossible to send 6 billion people through a stargate unless you turned them all into sterile, docile, robots that don't die of old age or something.

[Indon]

On foot, or in specially designed person transports to a designated location prepared to take them?

On foot, the answer will be 'a really long time'. Unrealistically long, even.

Now if you preplanned this, transported the Stargate to a specific location in which there were miles upon miles of transport vehicles ready to move out to a location specifically designed to accept the ludicrous logistics problems, you could concievably transport thousands of individuals each minute - so assuming 2K individuals a minute, we have 3 million minutes, 50,000 hours, 2083 and change days, to roughly 5.7 years.

So: 5.7 years might not be a bad estimate for a very well-prepared evacuation plan, using modern technology, towards a preprepared evacuation destination.

[Rutskarn]

People might actually breed faster than they can be evacuated.

[Ravens_cry]

Idea, use trains.
Lay down track through the Stargate and out the other side at the intended address along with room to stop. If the train moves at least 4 times after then people can walk, a slow speed for a train, stops, backs up and gets another load, your moving people through faster then just simply walking through, as it can carry people packed in then they could walk.

[thegurullamen]

Assuming you shackle their wrists with some solid iron, you could probably do it in under a year with a massive rail gun powered with whatever energy is coming from the thing necessitating the exodus of six billion people. Ship them en masse to a staging area where they're led (or airdropped) into a funneling apparatus leading into the rail barrel which, naturally, ends at the Stargate.

Sadly, only demons can do it this way because what comes out on the other side can only be described as a "terracide mural". (However, if demons are indeed the operators, the process could be sped up by setting the rail tunnel in a vacuum rather than in some noisome atmosphere to cut down on physical resistance. [Other possibilities such as liquid iron injections and soul-rending death hymns would likely occur.] As location is no longer an issue in this hypothetical, there also opens up the possibility of leaching energy off of a nearby black hole to keep the gate open permanently at the cost of... being close to a black hole.)

[Athaniar]

Ancient beaming techonology would help a lot.

[GoC]

Idea, use trains.
Lay down track through the Stargate and out the other side at the intended address along with room to stop. If the train moves at least 4 times after then people can walk, a slow speed for a train, stops, backs up and gets another load, your moving people through faster then just simply walking through, as it can carry people packed in then they could walk.
Difficult...
A 1km long train going back and forwards could probably make the round trip in three minutes. How long is a subway train and how many people can it carry?

[Cire II]

Why is the Earth being evacuated in this scenario?If there is a time limit of days ,months or less than a few dozen years it would impossible.

[Hermit]

Plus there's the logistics of actually getting everyone TO the Stargate. Depending on how much warning the organisers get is going to play a big part. If it's months, you might consider implementing some sort of sweep for the most promising candidates to save first - Ideally you'd do this covertly so as to avoid mass hysteria. If you only get a few days or hours warning, then it's going to be crisis management - government leaders are likely to use their positions to get themselves and their families out first. The question of who gets saved (Since you can't save everyone) is going to rest on which country is actually in control of said gate.

If the imminent doom is common knowledge, then you've got a whole heap more problems - Riots are a certainty, folks trying to hole up in any underground areas they can, and probably a rise in religious doomsday cults (Judgement day is upon us! and so on). None of these things are likely to make massive scale evacuation any easier :p

All this is also relying on your team in charge of the gate remaining calm - There's every chance some of them would bolt through at the first oppourtunity.

[Cire II]

Can more than one stargate operate on a planet at one time?I Can't remember from the show.

[Tiger Duck]

no theire can only be one active gate at the same time,
nevertheless they could stet up different gates on different locations to connect one at a time.

[Yora]

Getting the people through the gate isn't even the real problem. Getting them to clear the space on the other side of the gate is much more of a trouble. :smallbiggrin:

[charl]

Can more than one stargate operate on a planet at one time?I Can't remember from the show.

No. When another Stargate was active on earth, SG Command couldn't use their gate.

A solution would be to first transfer the population into one of those wraith abduction machines, or the stargate buffer it self, and just send those through the gate, where you let everyone out again. That would probably be faster than manually walking all of them through.

[Cire II]

Oh yeah now I remember,and a Pegasus gate overrides a milkyway gate.

[Thrawn183]

Well, 4 people are shown going through the gate side by side with ease. So you could probably do 5 side by side. In addition, you could make more than one "floor." I'm going to estimate that you could have 2 groups of 5 going through at a time. Now assume that you're getting people to move through pretty quickly, call it a group every second.

That comes out to 10 people a second, 600 a minute, 36k an hour, 864k a day, 31.5 mil (roughly) a year.

Edit: Considering how long this would take, I don't find it unreasonable to have time to train people in getting through the gate as quickly as possible (ordered in other words.)

The real problem with this is the rate at which the population is increasing. That whole thing where you could have a line of chinese walking into the ocean and they'd be replaced as fast as they died.

[Douglas]

It all depends on how many trains you can build, how long you can make them, and how fast they can go. Pack people into enough hypersonic maglev trains to stretch hundreds of miles when all lined up, and the stargate itself wouldn't actually be that much of a bottleneck. Load a billion people onto the trains, send them through, disembark, send the trains back, repeat. Sure, the logistics of setting this up would be a nightmare, but with the full resources of a world with 6 billion people it should be possible.

[thegurullamen]

The real problem with this is the rate at which the population is increasing. That whole thing where you could have a line of chinese walking into the ocean and they'd be replaced as fast as they died.

So the overall population remains constant, yes? I think you're overlooking a couple of issues: people aren't going to want to be giving birth in line so pre-pregnancy activities are probably going to die down, at least among the more intelligent (and thus, more survival-prone) line dwellers. Living in a line is pretty much taking a more leisurely death march. Unless you can get supplies to everyone in an efficient manner the likes of which haven't been seen for centuries (if ever), then you're looking at heavy losses.

And there's still the issue that brought about the exodus. Whatever it is is likely to pick off at least a few stragglers if not wipe out entire modern languages.

[Ravens_cry]

Difficult...
A 1km long train going back and forwards could probably make the round trip in three minutes. How long is a subway train and how many people can it carry? A subway/light rail type train is what I meant. The R44 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R44_(New_York_City_Subway_car)) needs at least two cars, each one is 75 feet long, 12 feet high and 10 feet wide, together hold 148 people, with a maximum speed of 87 3/4 miles an hour. This, in my view, would be much superior to simply walking people through the gate.

[GoC]

A subway/light rail type train is what I meant. The R44 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R44_(New_York_City_Subway_car)) needs at least two cars, each one is 75 feet long, 12 feet high and 10 feet wide, together hold 148 people, with a maximum speed of 87 3/4 miles an hour. This, in my view, would be much superior to simply walking people through the gate.

Three minutes for a round trip with a 1km train assumed a decent maglev. 1 person per foot of length is much worse than I thought it would be. Still, 20 people per second is much better than walking. And they can probably hold more people than that when well packed. Call it a 40 person/second upper bound.

Oh wait, that's seated. That number can easily be tripled by making everyone stand. Maybe even quadrupled. So 60-80 people per second. Nice! You can evacuate two billion people in a single year!

[Flame of Anor]

What if you put the Stargate on Earth on its side in a hole? Then just have everyone leap in. The other end might pile up...so have it in constant motion--on a truck, say. Just imagine the truck driving cross-country, Stargate on top spewing people behind it as it goes...just don't have the second Stargate facing up, or you'll get the Portal Bounce Effect.

[AlterForm]

What if you put the Stargate on Earth on its side in a hole? Then just have everyone leap in. The other end might pile up...so have it in constant motion--on a truck, say. Just imagine the truck driving cross-country, Stargate on top spewing people behind it as it goes...just don't have the second Stargate facing up, or you'll get the Portal Bounce Effect.

Or maybe have one gate facing downwards and funneling people into it, while the other is attached to the underside of a custom-built vehicle that drives over padding flooring with the gate held unobstructed a few feet above said flooring. Drive the vehicle in a large enough loop, and you can have people get out of the way before it rolls around again.

[charl]

The problem with that is that not all people would be able to make such a jump. Small children, the elderly, the diseased, the pregnant etc. could be seriously hurt doing such a thing.

[Jamin]

Too Long Jamin is cool and cute

[Aotrs Commander]

Something else to consider; as a Stargate can only be opened for about, as stated 35 minutes, the redial time alone becomes non-trivial.

As a rough guestimate (anybody willing to go look on youtube or something) I'd say it probably takes between one and two minutes you dial the gate out of SGC. Of course, if you're talking about using a DHD, the time drops drastically; still about twenty-thitry seconds seconds or so though.

Another point to consider is how continuously you can use the gate. How long can you keep opening and closing a gate before it's power reserves become exhausted and it needs to be recharged (whether it does so itself or from an external source)? I don't actually know...I don't recall anyone using a gate in such an extended fashion (i.e. constantly for years) in the show.

Using GoC's train estimate as the most generous so far (80 people/second), you could get about 168000 people per wormhole. That's knocking on for 36000 wormholes (that rounding up assuming only 0.008% extra wormholes due to problems). At that sort of use, the actual maintainance of the gate themselves becomes an issue at that number of use cycles. It's concievable that at that sort of usage, even the gate-builder technology might need some sort of maintainace (let alone SGC technology it that's being used too). Which means downtime (assuming it can be fixed).

This, of course, still ignores the unfathomable logisitcal challenge at both ends. Or all ends; nothing says the outgoing wormholes would or should go to the same spot. (Indeed, it might be easier to have several or many drop points if possible, to ease the congestion on the exit side.)



Ultimately, I think the answer is simply: too long to be practical if as a result from a crisis. In order to evacuate your planet within a large timescale, it might be possible as a sort of steady migration over decades, I suppose; though again, I think the important point becomes the gates themselves and whether they can really stand the abuse of constant use.

[Seraph]

tilt stargate 1 at a 60 deg. angle with the entry side up.

build ramp that leads to entry.

tilt stargate 2 at 45 deg angle, with a similar padded ramp, preferably of extreme length.

possibly, use significant amounts of lubricative jelly to coat the ramps.

activate stargate, send people down the ramp as fast as possible.

[Flame of Anor]

The problem with that is that not all people would be able to make such a jump. Small children, the elderly, the diseased, the pregnant etc. could be seriously hurt doing such a thing.

Children are pretty resilient, as Willy Wonka showed us. Pregnant women...hmm...something else could be set up. Elderly and diseased...hmm. If there's time to get everyone through, great, but if not...well, I don't want to seem cold-hearted, but they might have to make way for the young and healthy who would contribute more to society.

[Mikeavelli]

Something else to consider; as a Stargate can only be opened for about, as stated 35 minutes, the redial time alone becomes non-trivial.


There was an episode where one of the villains was using a laser to try and melt the Iris open, he was forcing the Stargate to stay open, and dialing the Earth Stargate with a DHD faster than they could dial it with the Earth technology, forcing it open for several hours straight.

They eventually solved this when they figured out they could start the dialing process before the previous stargate had closed, allowing them to dial out within a few seconds.

I don't think this ever came up as a plot point again though.

[Talya]

The original post said nothing about getting them through alive.

Assuming you're herding a foodsource through the gate, you'd probably do best to freeze the people and store them in large refrigeration containers.

[shadzar]

The original post said nothing about getting them through alive.

Assuming you're herding a foodsource through the gate, you'd probably do best to freeze the people and store them in large refrigeration containers.

:smalleek: Freeze 'em in carbonite!

[Talya]

:smalleek: Freeze 'em in carbonite!

Perfect! Then they are more marketable as a foodsource. Wraith need them alive, you know.

[shadzar]

Perfect! Then they are more marketable as a foodsource. Wraith need them alive, you know.

But you would need to have larger sections of them like a puddle jumper, but on wheels, or pontoons, depending on the exit point of the wormhole.

[Talya]

But you would need to have larger sections of them like a puddle jumper, but on wheels, or pontoons, depending on the exit point of the wormhole.


If you could find a buyer who was basically just interested in the proteins that make the people up, you could position the stargate flat at the bottom of an antlion-like pit and just bulldoze the people in.

[shadzar]

Well if it is just for food source...you could make a giant people juicer and position it over a stargate so it would just run out.

[Talya]

Ship Soylent Green to the pegasys galaxy!

[shadzar]

Ship Soylent Green to the Pegasus galaxy!

Or back from. :smallwink:

[charl]

But the wraith have no need for dead food.

I can't think of any SG enemies that would have use for human flesh actually, except maybe the Genii or the space travellers. IE, other humans with limited food sources.

[Tiger Duck]

Going back to evacuating all humans alive. the biggest downside of trains would be that you would have to dial back to get the train back home.

So I think the most efficient way would be to have at least 2 or more gates with at least 3 trains. Trains that takes 35min to drive trough the gate at full speed.
Train "a" would load passengers in station "A" and drive tough the gate
while its driving train "b" gets loaded in station "B" and when "a" is done dials the target gate and drives trough while "b" is driving "a" gets unloaded and "c" gets loaded in station "A". when "b" is trough train "a" dials earth and returns to station "B". when it arrives "c" is loaded and is ready to leave. and when c goes to the target planet "b" should be unloaded, who can then return to earth. ad nausium...

the more trains their would be the more time the peoples would have to get on and of the train.