Realistic, or at least plausible, science has always been an important part of the vision of Stargate. Now meet one of the people key to bringing that vision to life! Mika McKinnon, Science Consultant for SGA and SGU, joins DialtheGate to answer your questions LIVE!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
0:20 – Opening Credits
0:48 – Welcome and Episode Outline
01:22 – Call to Action
01:56 – Guest Introduction
05:38 – How Mika got into the franchise
08:08 – Perseverance Rover on Mars
12:24 – An SGU Stargate on Mars
13:00 – Dichotomy between Sci-fi writers and scientists
18:23 – Mika’s Interests in Science Fiction
19:48 – Discovering Stargate
20:37 – SGA 5×16 “Brain Storm”
22:06 – Stargate is chicken soup
24:33 – Working as a science consultant (SGU 1×14 Human)
26:33 – How possible is it to create a Stargate
31:29 – How realistic do you think one-way wormhole travel is?
34:33 – Gaters’ reaction to the scientific accuracy
37:06 – Pulsar radiation (SGU 1×19 “Incursion”)
42:22 – Becoming a Science Consultant
43:32 – What is there at the end of the universe? (SGU 2×15 “Seizure”)
46:38 – Unexplained stuff around us (“Phantom Signals” 2020)
47:42 – Do aliens exist?
53:18 – Is transporter beam technology possible?
54:30 – Have you written McKay lines?
55:42 – How much of the math on the walls of the Destiny was real?
57:35 – Does hyperspace and subspace exist?
58:50 – If you could go anywhere through the Stargate, where would it be?
1:00:29 – Elite: Dangerous
1:02:35 – Thank You, Mika!
1:03:00 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:06:18 – End Credits

***

“Stargate” and all related materials are owned by MGM Studios and MGM Television.

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Welcome to episode 54 of Dial the Gate, my name is David Read. Happy Sunday to y’all! One of the exciting things about doing this show is getting a chance to introduce you to, and talk with people, who really made the franchise happen and we’re excited to be a part of it. Mika McKinnon is one of those people and we’re going to be bringing her in in just a moment here. But before we bring her on, I do want you to let your friends know about our show. If you like Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, it would mean a great deal if you click the like button. It really makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm and will definitely help the show grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you want to get notified about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. Giving the bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guest changes, this is key if you plan on watching live. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next several days and weeks on Gateworld.net. I’m very lucky this episode to have us be joined by Mika McKinnon, science consultant, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe. Hello.

Mika McKinnon
Hello.

David Read
How are you?

Mika McKinnon
I am doing well.

David Read
All things considered.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, exactly. Within the context of everything and being a disaster scientist in the midst of everything. I’m doing great. We just have new standards for what fine looks like.

David Read
Yeah, exactly. The Overton window just kind of has to slot itself into this new position now. It’s like, “I’m alive and alive is good.” You just relayed a very interesting little nugget about something that we’re finding out about ourselves, in terms of human responses and communication. Could you relay that to everyone else?

Mika McKinnon
Oh, right. I have a newborn right now so I’ve been very concerned that they’ve only seen me and my partner with our masks off, everyone else is either through a screen or masks on. One of the pieces of research that’s already coming out is that people are getting better at recognizing each other and reading expressions using just their eyes. That’s what’s happening on the upper cheeks and what’s happening with the eye squinting and all of that, is showing each other expressions. Although none of us would have planned this situation in order to run experiments, we have been able to do things that otherwise we wouldn’t have. At the very beginning of the pandemic I was part of a global collaboration looking at seismic signals and we were able to see the entire Earth just get a little bit quieter, as all the people stopped running around creating artificial seismic noise that interfered with our signals. So that’s been accidentally awesome in a terrible sort of way.

David Read
The side effects from this thing have just been absolutely wacky in all kinds of ways. I always thought it was a myth that when someone, for instance, goes blind, their hearing becomes more sensitive. Now I’m beginning to wonder. Especially, if we lose access to information, we start looking to other places where we can get information and start enhancing those sensitivities. I mean, sensors, I suppose. In terms of what we’re taking in right here [eyes], as opposed to right here [mouth], right?

Mika McKinnon
Exactly. We’ve spent so much time learning how to decipher each other’s expressions and who people are based on their mouths. Now we don’t have that, we’re learning different styles. I gotta admit, human cognition, not my specialty. I am much better with disasters and with stars and with astronomy and all the rest of it. But you know, the psychology department and the geology department were literally next door neighbors so we did have a lot of “you’ve got free food, I’ve got free time, let’s go over there and learn about your science things happening.” Lots of intellectual exchanges based on coffee. The key part of interdisciplinary research is figuring out who has coffee hours, when, filling in those gaps and showing up. From that, that’s where I’m learning all of my human cognition, is the friends I made by stealing their coffee.

David Read
Absolutely. Hey, gotta do what you can! When you’re surrounded by people with such a varying degree of knowledge like that and such unique specialties in certain areas, you got to be curious on your own right and say, “Okay, you gotta tell me a little bit about what you’re working on.”

Mika McKinnon
I’m going to bring it back to Stargate for you in the most hilarious way. So once upon a time, I wasn’t the Stargate science advisor, a man named Steve Conboy was. Steve Conboy was an actual String Theorist. What had happened was Stargate showed up at UBC and said “we need a String Theorist” and Steve went “okay” and showed up. He literally would write his thesis on the sets of Stargate before he wrote it in his thesis. There’s original string theory published in Stargate SG-1 that scooped his own actual academic publications. But then Steve met a pretty girl in a telescope in South America and left. In the meantime she and I both lived at the same graduate residence at a UBC place called Green college where the whole idea is you get people from vastly different fields, who really like to learn and who really liked to talk. It’s like having the most social and curious of all your researchers, put them in one place and say, “live together, share your meals, find out what happens.” I had spent two years listening to Steve tell me his onset stories and I realized that Stargate didn’t need a String Theorist, they needed a creative scientist. So when he left for South America and Stargate came asking, “hey, we need a new String Theorist, who’s available?” I went “me! I’m not your String Theorist but I am your scientist.” I showed up on the first day and was very excited and curious, just like everybody at Green College is. It worked out and they hired me to come back the next day, the next and the next and the next. That’s how we did that transition. You asked for a String Theorist because that’s the smartest scientist you could think of, turns out, not exactly what they needed.

David Read
I am really glad to have you on to discuss some of these Stargate memories Mika. We met at Gatecon 2018, I think it was. You were walking through, I was getting my camera set up for something, you had just found out something, I can’t remember what it was. You had just found out something extremely cool about something very esoteric and you were so excited about it and you made me excited about it too. I was like, “if I ever get my own show, I’ve got to have her on.” I appreciate you coming on to share some of the excitement and love that you have for this franchise and outerspace.

Mika McKinnon
Always, always, always. Well, of course, the huge outerspace news right now is the Mars Perseverance Rover that just landed. I don’t know if anybody has seen what the hazard maps look like, but this is the most dangerous and tricky landing they’ve ever done. It’s Jericho crater, geologically absolutely fascinating. It has the ability to go to a whole bunch of different rock types which is important because this rover has a baby helicopter on board that’s gonna help it go rock collecting. The extremes to which humans will go through to have rock collections just absolutely delights me. So we’re gonna send this little rover running around this giant crater trying to find the very coolest rocks and get help from the helicopter to go to places the rover can’t, yeah. But by going to this incredibly interesting place, we’re also going to this incredibly dangerous place. If you look at the hazard map of like, “green is safe, red is doom.” It’s seriously all tangled up together with these little tiny patches of green and this big ocean of red and you’re like, “okay!” They did so many things to help with this landing. The rover itself is the same basic body type as the Curiosity Rover and the landing style is the same basic type of Curiosity Rover, which in and of itself is absolutely bonkers. It’s a sky crane so it has its own personal jetpack, it blasts off and then lowers the rover. You’re like, “that sounds really way harder than just landing,” but it’s actually safer and more stable. It sounds bonkers but it separates all the mechanics of landing from all the mechanics of being stable on the ground. If the Rover had it’s wheel land on a rock or something, the sky crane can stabilize it instead of the whole thing toppling over. It’s also way less bonkers than what we did with Spirit and Opportunity where it’s just like “wrap it in bubble wrap, throw it at a planet, let it bounce until it stops.”

David Read
Until it stops and then we’ll figure it out.

Mika McKinnon
They did two things. First of all, instead of doing distance to the ground, they did, “how fast are we going?” for indicating when to start using the different techniques for slowing down. That’s a new cool thing where we didn’t have to successfully guesstimate what the Martian atmosphere would do. The other thing though, is it had real time hazard mapping. It had hazard cameras pointed at the ground and going “there’s a rock! Over, over, over, move.” The robot has to do it all by itself. Since we’re seven minutes light speed away we can’t do anything by the time we find out there’s a problem, if the Rover is alive or dead. So we give it hazard cameras. But, this is the cinematic bit and the part that’s going to inspire sci-fi and again, bringing it back to Stargate, is they had all of those cameras going during the descent and the landing. We got the hazard camera photo back right away, being like, “Yo, where are we? Oh, look, cool rock. It’s got weird couples, wonder if it’s volcanic or sedimentary, don’t know. So excited to find out!” But it also had cameras like the sky crane pointing down at the rover. You might have seen this image, if you haven’t, go look it up. You can come back to us [inaudible] for whatever, it is that incredible. It’s the Rover dangling above the surface with all the top wires up and the umbilical cord wire back to the sky crane. It looks like an umbilical cord, you’re like, “ah, I understand the baby [inaudible].” You can see the wheels just about to touch the ground and little bits of dust getting kicked up and everything, it’s phenomenal. What’s really, really exciting is this is one photo of all the ones they did during the descent that they’re putting together into a movie that we should expect to see on Monday. I am going to absolutely lose my shit.

David Read
Awesome! It’s so cool.

Mika McKinnon
We have never seen this before and this is also the first time we’ve put microphones on the planet.

David Read
We are going to hear another world.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah. All of this is going to come out in the next like couple of days. Unfortunately, people got impatient and made viral fakes this weekend. I’m like, “aaah, real life is cooler.”

David Read
The Stargate community knows no bounds. [holds up photo of Stargate on Mars] I mean, I think we figured out where Destiny made its first stop.

Mika McKinnon
There we go. I appreciate that. See that, that works for me. Nobody [inaudible] that as the first video from this thing. Which you can do, there’s a NASA, again, if you haven’t experienced it, NASA put together a tool that you can add your photos or whatever on to particular patch of Martian background as part of the outreach about Perseverance.

David Read
I attended a convention, it was either WonderCon, it was in Anaheim in 2017 I think it was. Or 2018, it was 2018. I was a panel of half sci-fi writers and half scientists. Through the entire panel, the writers, if I distilled the essence of all they were saying, without exception, their mood was “right now sucks.” The NASA and JPL people in the group, without exception, at the end of that hour, the end result was “right now is amazing, the stuff that’s coming out.” The dichotomy between the two groups up on stage, it was so obvious that they were coming at things from different worlds. I’m like, “I’m really thankful that the people who are actually involved and progressing us forward scientifically are the people who are the ones who are so excited about the promise of what discovery and learning and exploration will do for us as a species and for us to grow beyond this world, to Mars, out into the galaxy and also to understand ourselves better as a result.” I found that dichotomy extremely interesting. Can you relate to that?

Mika McKinnon
Every time I sit down with writers, it’s always “okay, so what sort of story do you want to tell? Great!. Let me teach you all the things.” My job is pretty much to be a one-on-one science tutor of very focused stuff. So let’s say they want to do something on a desert world, great. Let’s talk about how sound dunes form and change and move and what sort of geology you get. When you get deserts at all, in the first place, what sort of ecological systems and how does the temperature fluctuate? All of these tiny tidbits of science, all of which are perfect to hang a story hook and go “Alright, from there, where do you go?” As soon as I know what direction the story is going, “Oh, okay, here’s the other things. More and more and more. I don’t know what pieces they are going to want to use.” But there’s just so much opportunity to do it. Sometimes it’s hard to be optimistic. I work with disasters, I literally work with people on the worst day of their entire lives. When I’m not doing that, I’m trying to convince people to do things while things are great so they never experience the worst day of their entire lives. Nobody wants to do it. It’s just, “it hasn’t happened, it’s not going to happen.” We have this little flaw in human cognition; low frequency high impact events. We only think the good ones will happen and never the bad; we will win the lottery but the big earthquake isn’t going to happen in my lifetime.

David Read
Normalcy bias.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, that’s just how we think about things. It’s totally worth it to buy a lottery ticket but I’m not going to have the 1 in 100 year storm even though we’ve had like 15 of them in the last 10 years.

David Read
Is it a survival mechanism in our brains?

Mika McKinnon
I don’t know. It’s a really frustrating one if it is because it’s making it really difficult to deal with things like changing the resources now to make things better in the future. It’s never too late to make things less bad. Even just thinking about disaster preparedness actually makes you more likely to survive. When we’re not in a pandemic, my number one tip for increasing your survival capacity in a disaster is throw parties and invite your neighbors. Don’t do that during a pandemic.

David Read
Don’t do that right now, but yeah, otherwise, absolutely.

Mika McKinnon
That’s how you build your community resilience. The people who had that sort of neighborliness going on have been able to do things like mutual aid, to get through the pandemic. Or to be able to understand who’s got particularly vulnerable community members and kick up the supports for them. At the beginning of the pandemic there were people in my building putting up signs being like, “hey, I’m available to go grocery shopping for you if you have a compromised immune system.” We we’re helping each other out that way.

David Read
Yeah, share some oxytocin. Do some good things for one another.

Mika McKinnon
This far into the pandemic, it’s a little bit worn out.

David Read
That’s the other thing, but you gotta do what you can. You got to get on Zoom with people, you have to continue to make eye contact and communicate as many ways as you can. I know a lot of people are just kind of shutting off and shutting down and it’s like, “it’s not good man, you can still talk to me, still need to hear your voice.”

Mika McKinnon
There’s a lot of research in disasters about what the psychological and emotional impact of a disaster is. You’ve got immediate impact, everybody feels terrible. But then you start climbing back up and you get, almost a high, from the heroic aspect of the “well, my community can pull together and do this.” Then you come crashing back down and then you start having things like you have little ups and downs and ups and downs. Every time you’ve got an anniversary or something you have a big crash again. Anniversaries of lockdown are coming up real fast. At the same time anniversaries of big climate events; in Australia they’re dealing with the anniversary of the black fires last year. We were like, “wow, that was a year ago.”

David Read
You take stock in things and it’s like “how far have I come? How far have I not come?” We’re learning a lot. Mika, where does your interest in science come from? I’ve so been looking forward to this story.

Mika McKinnon
I come from a family that is very, very, very curious. My mom’s an artist and I think about half of my cousins are scientists now, I’m not quite sure. But it was always, if you wanted to know something, the answer was, “let’s figure it out.” We never had “because I said so” as an answer or “we don’t know.” It was always “let’s try and figure it out.” So all of my childhood photos, all of my small toddler photos and all that, are like pokey sticks at tide pools or using a screwdriver on a poor little engine that I’m sure never ran again. Three year olds should not be in charge of carrying out a lawnmower engine. There was just a lot of experimenting and a lot of encouraging that curiosity. It wasn’t about having an answer, it was about asking the questions. There was so much creativity in it. So many people think of art and science as being totally separate, but they’re not. They’re just expressions of creativity and different ways of exploring your questions of what is that core curiosity and then implementing it. There was a lot of encouraging and supporting that.

David Read
When did you discover Stargate?

Mika McKinnon
I think I watched season one. I gotta say that’s a little bit fuzzy in my memories at this point. Stargate was on for a really long time.

David Read
17 seasons, 14 years man. That’s a lot of time.

Mika McKinnon
I don’t remember the first episode that I watched. I do remember the first time I was on set, freaking out, because they brought me into John Sheppard’s bedroom to give me my instructions for the day. Yeah, yeah. I was distracted but successfully accomplished my objective for the day. I pulled it together enough to know what was going on. I got starstruck on the Stargate set several times. I remember when I was on Brainstorm…

David Read
Yes, oh my gosh.

Mika McKinnon
…where we had Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye the Science Guy and them I was fine with. It was a little bit hilarious for me that my boss on set was clearly excited to have a surprise. He led me across set, keeping me behind him, and when we walked into this group, standing in a little huddle talking, pulled me, pushed me in front, says “we have a scientist, go on and do science with them.” That’s how I met Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think we talked about Martian perchlorates. We just discovered a particular type of chemical on Mars that is a possible precursor, or maybe biologically associated, one of those “hey, we found things on Mars that might indicate past life, or at least past possibility of life.” I know it happens every year but it was one of those. So that was fun, but getting introduced to the director that time, I lost the capacity for speech. I couldn’t say hello back, it was just like [silence]. I definitely had some moments on set where like, “I’m trying to contain my fan girl squealing and do my job.”

David Read
That show brings out the best in us. Stargate really does just encourage people to become their best selves. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, it’s like chicken soup on so many grounds. It encourages us to think and to wonder and to ponder our presuppositions. I think that’s one of the things that I’ve always loved about it. I’ve always thought or leaned kind of this way, now this episode is kind of making me think, “hmm, maybe I’m wrong? Or maybe there’s something else to this.” I think that’s what science fiction does when it’s at its best; it doesn’t beat you over the head and say, “you’re wrong.” Well, it doesn’t beat you over the head, if it’s doing anything good it’s scratching you from the back and saying, “What if? What if this?”

Mika McKinnon
I love the “what ifs?” When I first started trying to talk about and explain what a science consultant does, I had described it as a safe way to explore the “what ifs” of science. I remember Carl Ninder being like “I don’t know if I’d ever call it safe.” True, very true. Nobody dies but emotionally you may not come out the same as you did when you first came in.

David Read
Correct.

Mika McKinnon
That was the early correction where I was like “right, okay, yep, I’m gonna stop describing it that way. It’s just nobody dies in real life, that’s all. I get to blow up planets and resurface them and have some stars explode and all of that without anybody actually dying in real life.” Which is a bonus when you’re specializing disasters, but, not necessarily safe.

David Read
You must have played a lot of Sim Earth.

Mika McKinnon
Oh, yeah. Completely. I am a massive video game junkie, I am a huge sci-fi junkie. I love exploring with things. With science you’re supposed to follow very reproducible steps. Your objective is to uncover what is the truth about reality. There’s a lot in there that’s very persnickety, you’ve got to get it exactly perfectly right. Or again, people die and that’s bad news for everybody involved. What I really love about working as a science consultant and science advisor is this ability to take things and play with them and go “okay, what if this one thing was different? What are all the consequences of that?” Being able to do it on Stargate was phenomenal because I’d be able to do it season after season after season after season and take that one core of an idea and bring it through. In Stargate Universe there’s a cryptography episode, Human, that has an actual code that I developed for the episode that you could break in that episode and then use it for spoilers in future episodes.

David Read
You did not?

Mika McKinnon
I did. It was fun, it was super, super fun. and the key for it is actually listed in the episode if you’re paying enough attention. To be able to do little easter eggs like that was just so much fun. Being able to be consistent with it so that you had the same particular Ancient alphabet letter would mean the same thing, season after season after season after season in all these different contexts. It means my notes for it are still huge. I live in eternal optimism that we will get a reboot and I’ll need all my notes again.

David Read
Continuation. A continuation.

Mika McKinnon
I would like to continue things and be able to use all of my notes and “go all right, let’s do this.” Particularly because we left on such a tantalizing edge about cosmic microwave background, which was actually my undergraduate research. My first ever research project is the big question in that.

David Read
If that’s something that’s written somewhere, I would love to read it.

Mika McKinnon
Unfortunately no, I did not write that down. I was still learning how to science at that stage and I was not very good at the whole “it’s not science until you write it down” aspect. But hey, I did get to build things that went into high orbit and all that.

David Read
Yeah, there you go. You always hear people talking about, basically humans are never going to be able to leave the solar system. To break the light barrier is impossible, we’ll never leave. But we can subvert it. Let me back up. How possible is it, do you think, to create a device like a Gate?

Mika McKinnon
So, in a lot of ways it’s an engineering problem as opposed to a science problem. Which, as a scientist, I’m full on for that. When we’re looking at these really extreme boundary conditions of “can you have, not faster than light travel, but being able to to connect chunks of space time together and get through?” We think that black holes already might do that, black holes might have wormholes. We’re not really quite sure because of information destruction across the black hole barrier. We clearly don’t understand some aspects of the physics of our universe because they break down inside of black holes. So the trick then becomes, “can you have a traversable wormhole? Can you have one that is big enough that you can go through it and stable enough that you can go through it?”

David Read
Without being broken into bits?

Mika McKinnon
The physics of “can you have a traversable wormhole?” That physics exists and Kip Thorne came through and wrote it all out. We actually use a particular variation of a specific type of traversable wormhole that we use consistently throughout the entire Stargate series. For the people who really like their equations, you can identify what type of traversable wormhole we use. When I say it’s an engineering problem, the problem is it requires negative energy density. In Stargate we use Zero Point Modules, ZPMs. In real life, well how do you get negative energy density? To do that you need to take vacuum and make it colder. “Well, how do you take something has nothing and make it cold there?” Well, that requires negative energy. How do you get negative energy? Well, you take a vacuum…. It turns into this cyclic sort of thing where you’re like “okay, engineering problem.” Could we harness some of the pair, anti-pair creation on the edges of black holes and use that? I don’t know. If so, does that turn every black hole into a refueling station? In which case can we please have a series about…Instead of field geophysicist, which is what I am, I run around on the surface of the Earth and blow things up and fly in helicopters and all that and make the Earth tell me its secrets. It’s very evil and fun. It really is like this mix of James Bond villain and MacGyver where you’re like “yes, let’s just zap the Earth with 2400 volts of electricity, muhahaha.”

David Read
Harness the White House with a giant magnet.

Mika McKinnon
Instead of having a show about field geophysics, I’d love to have like a show aboat field astrophysicists who have their stations on the edges of black holes where they’re trying to do all their observations there and can actually get out and poke the black hole and be like, “hey, what happens when you chuck a star into it?”

David Read
You just see this long band and then it just kind of slows to a stop.

Mika McKinnon
Exactly. You get a pair, anti-pair creation that we think happens around black holes where half balls and a half dozen and that’s how you have black hole evaporation of black holes super, super tiny. You might have heard about it in the news when the particle accelerator in Switzerland started spooling up.,

David Read
Yeah, the LHC.

Mika McKinnon
People were like, “hey, what if it has a black hole?” The answer was, “well, even if it did, it’d be so tiny that it instantly evaporates so who cares?”

David Read
Well, I always assumed “if it does, we’ll never know.”

Mika McKinnon
Particle accelerators are just this massively hilarious branch of science where, effectively, you take an alarm clock and you smash it with a sledgehammer and you look at all the pieces that fly out and go “I understand the fundamental building blocks of the universe.” It’s amazing. You can’t actually pick up the spring or the alarm clock arm, you can only like look at their shadows.

David Read
Right, and infer information from it.

Mika McKinnon
Yes, and they use this to do eye surgery. It is just like, “what!” University of British Columbia, the big university right in Vancouver, it’s where Stargate went to find their scientists, we have an on-campus particle accelerator that most people don’t even know is there. It’s like a stealth particle accelerator just hanging out, on campus, underground, whatever. Surprise!

David Read
Some breakthrough down the line. “Where did that come from?” “Oh, well, you know…”

Mika McKinnon
If only you were paying attention to what’s underneath your building, you would know.

David Read
How realistic do you think one way wormhole travel? Is that just a story contrivance? Or does unidirectional travel have any foundation in science?

Mika McKinnon
So that again would come down to the energy issue. You’ve got the aspect of space time, that time is one directional. We don’t understand the “why” of why time is one directional; why can’t you go the other way? You can go both ways in space and time is just an extra dimension of that.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah. Why is this a one way thing? That’s why anytime you talk about time machines, it should involve travel through space as well. My favorite fictional time machine, contraption, based on physics but you need the negative energy density so you have that hardcore engineering problem, is doing donuts with it. You have to run around backwards in the doughnut to run backwards in time and go forwards in it order to go forwards in time. The physics works out perfectly, effectively you run around in circles around black holes. We have a little bit more engineering details but that’s the basic premise. So from that idea, if we don’t know why time is only one way, then ultimately, why is space two ways? If you’re already punching a hole through space time in order to connect two points together, which chunk will dominate? Will it be the time or will it be the space that says you can go both ways or one way? Again, coming down to the engineering aspect of, depends where you’ve got the negative energy density to take this from a hole to being a traversable hole, who’s got the batteries? So possible, plausible? I can justify it, I can come across with the maths and be like, “this is how it works.” Because we can’t test it, there are an infinite number of variations on this. It’s when I’m taking on a new show and they want to know, “hey, how do we go about doing this?” My question is always, “how do you want it to work and I will come up with the maths for you to support that because there’s so many choices.” Going back to the time travel thing, there’s another variation of time travel where every time machine is also a cloning machine. You can travel back through time, you’re just going to have a copy and another copy and another copy and another copy and another copy.

David Read
We can’t go backwards in time.

David Read
In the same universe or creating multiple universes?

Mika McKinnon
Same universe, you can do it all in the same universe. Or you can do like a practical theorist, if you want to do that that’s a whole different chunk. You can separate them out or put them together and be like it’s “photocopy machine for you and your universe while you travel through time. Who wants to? Let’s do this.” This is what I mean about this is such a fun job to do. Every time you get to create the basic building blocks of “how is this particular universe going to work?” Then being able to stick with that over and over and over again makes me so happy.

David Read
If you’re consistent in the rules that you set up and you can reward the audience based on the standards that you have set up and also encourage them to explore the fundamentals of where this all came from, it’s a win win.

Mika McKinnon
Oh yeah. When I first started doing conventions I was so scared that I’d be turning into this thing where I’d have somebody coming up to me and being like, “well, in this episode of this thing is inconsistent or [moaning].” I’d be going, “Oh, we tried our best. We had to make the story work first” or whatever. But instead, people come up and actually they’d apologize to me for not knowing science. That always makes me a little bit sad because you don’t need a science degree in order to experiment, right? Every time you bake a cake or a cookie and you change the recipe a little bit, you’re running an experiment; that’s applied chemistry. The analysis phase is tasting the cookie and deciding whether or not you like it. If you like it, you repeat the experiment over and over again. If you don’t like it, you make a new hypothesis of, “I think we should add an extra half teaspoon of vanilla extract, bump the temperature in the oven by five degrees and go a little bit longer.” You run a new experiment and then you do your analysis again through eating the cookie. Literally, every single cookbook is actually a lab notebook so everybody is doing chemistry on that.

David Read
Yeah, we’re all scientists.

Mika McKinnon
Every time you try and figure out “if this, then that,” every time you use your past experience to extrapolate what will happen in the future, you’re doing science there. It’s this incredibly powerful tool because through science we have the capacity to create any future we want. We can look at the future and go, “I want that one” and then take the actions now to make it happen. With climate change it’s getting kind of frustrating because we’re all sitting here being like, “well, nobody is enjoying these storms right now.” The fires and the freezing snaps and the giant hurricanes and the droughts and the floods, it’s just terrible. And the pandemics, also part of having a changing climate. Let’s just not do this, let’s opt out of this by changing our actions now to get a better future. It’s never too late to make things less bad but the longer we delay, the fewer options we have and the harder it is.

David Read
I love your story from Incursion. I’ve really been looking forward to having this story as a part of Dial the Gate. The pulsar that Destiny falls out of hyperspace into, nearby, please tell us about this story. This is fascinating. This is why Stargate is ahead of its time.

Mika McKinnon
All right. The idea was we needed an astrophysical big baddie to kill everybody every 22 minutes. The original idea was have a pulsar. Well pulsars are like lighthouses of death; every time they whirl around they send out high energy particles out one side, out their axis’ and it just kills everyone in its wake. Great, fantastic. But normally pulsars go so fast that we’re talking milliseconds and if you slowed it down so much that the beam was passing by every 22 minutes, it would be about as deadly as holding fridge magnets and doing cartwheels. Yes, it would generate an electromagnetic field, no, nobody would care. Nobody would even notice. Even if you were to have a pacemaker and we’re standing directly in the beam you’d be like “what? didn’t notice.” So that’s problem, because you’re astrophysical big baddie actually has to kill people in order for it to be scary. Technicalities don’t work. So we went “alright, what if instead we had a pulsar that was starving? So it was just on the verge of having enough mass to be able to generate those high energy beams, but not quite. It had a companion star, it had a big gas giant. It was a binary system, those stars were rotating around each other and when the feeder star was close enough the Pulsar ‘gobble snap’, munch it all up, get enough mass, start generating the beam, kill, kill, kill, die, die, die, all of that. Then that feeder star would go just out of range, the Pulsar would use up that mass through generating its beam and go quiescent, go quiet again. Then that star would come back around, it eats, we’d have the big death.” Great, excellent. Small problem, we’ve never seen a system like this anywhere in the universe. But there’s no reason why there couldn’t be one.

David Read
It could exist, but we just haven’t observed it.

Mika McKinnon
Exactly. We’re like, “well, we’ve seen all sorts of other binary systems. We’ve seen black holes and binary systems with pulsars. We’ve seen the neuron stars, neutron stars orbit around each other. We’ve had red giants hanging out with other stuff like…we’ve seen all sorts of combinations. Why not? Let’s just do it.” So we did, the episode aired. A couple of years later researchers found a system just like this in real life. Instead of calling it the Stargate system, which seriously they should have, they called it a Black Widow star. It’s a Black Widow pulsar that is slowly consuming its companion and instead of being every 22 minutes, it’s every six minutes. But aside from that, it’s our system, it’s our baby. We did it in Stargate first and then the universe is like, “oh,yeah, we totally have this. You want to check it out? We have in the back, let’s just pull it forward for you to observe properly.” I was truly proud of that because we took this little theory, this little idea that we needed for our plot, and it actually showed up in real life and it’s my pride and joy.

David Read
It’s a testament to how sound the science is. It’s a show and you’ve got to make the show work. First and foremost you got to make the story work so that we can fall in love with the characters and the situations that they deal with. But when you create something that later is so consistent to what is plausible, that it turns out to be true. I mean, we’ve only seen ones that do this [spin fast] and we found one that goes six minutes now. I mean, that’s just crazy; blows your mind.

Mika McKinnon
I love it. The way I always see it is the story is always going to come first. These are shows are meant for entertainment, they aren’t science documentaries, but the science can exist as a layer of plausibility to support the storyline. If you have plausible science, that means that your your viewers are given a nice strong foundation so they can come along for the ride and they can save their suspension of disbelief for somewhere where the plot needs it. Instead of trying to use up your suspension of disbelief on the gun that never runs out of ammo, you can hold on to it until you have the incredibly improbable, coincidental encounter of people talking about vital ideas. You can save it for the parts you actually need it. In the meantime, by having that plausible consistency, you’re building this strong world where everything has a bit more depth to it, a little bit more grounding to it. That’s what I really, really love about doing science consulting. There’s so many things I love about it, it’s just so much fun.

David Read
It’s a trip and you’re getting to watch our knowledge unfold and help creative people apply it in ways that it’s entertaining.

Mika McKinnon
Stargate was my first show which meant that the cast and crew of Stargate taught me how to be on set and taught me how to be able to work within this film world. The culture is way different than my science labs or than heading out to disaster sites or anything like that. They mentored me and taught me and showed me what does it mean and I’ve taken that same culture with me to any other show I work on. One of the things that made Stargate so special is that everybody, cast and crew, are just as curious and excited as you’d hope they were. We actually had filming get held up once because I was way too busy explaining the entire history of the universe to Robert Carlyle. Yes! I got it down, it took me a little bit, but I can now do a 30 second version of the entire history of the universe.

David Read
The elevator pitch of the history of the universe.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, exactly. It’s like “here’s how it works.” There was a scene with David Blue and David Hewlett where Eli and McKay were arguing about something, it had nothing to do with the plot. I could make it any science argument I wanted and the actors actually wanted to learn enough about the science to be able to pick which side of the argument they would be on based on their characters. I was just like, “Oh, you guys make me so happy.”

David Read
What was that argument because it was not in the forefront of the scene? I am trying to remember what the topic was, what they were debating.

Mika McKinnon
We didn’t explicitly say, you had to be able to recognize what the… It wasn’t written into the script, it was all visual. It was about the shape of the universe, which also means the beginning and end of the universe. So how is the universe eventually going to end? Which means will it expand forever or will it come contracting back down? Einstein’s greatest mistake is a particular character. If you do the mathematical formulation of universe there’s this constant of integration on the end called lambda. Because of the way the maths works you can set it to anything. Einstein originally set it so the universe never changed, the static universe. Then Hubble started making observations that the universe was expanding and Einstein went “ah! My greatest mistake.” We have spent all this time since then trying to figure out what lambda is. There’s this in real life amazing science story where at one point a telescope was staring into space and kept having the static on it. The people on the ground thought that it was pigeon poop so they actually assigned people to hang out near the telescope, scrubbing it out and hold onto brooms and chase away the pigeons. They still had the static and they’re like, “Oh, what is this?” They figured out it was the static of the microwave background radiation and if you look at shapes in that it tells you what lambda is. It turns out Stargate went down that route of “let’s look at patterns in the cosmic microwave background radiation.” While it had nothing to do with the plot, it’s a little bit of a hint in the teaser that it would have something to do with the plot later on; of figuring out what this structure is. It all ties together.

David Read
Well, of course. If McKay and Eli were given a moment, that’s probably something that they would have been discussing if they had a little bit of time. It makes a lot of sense.

Mika McKinnon
It’s this amazing question of “how much energy and dark energy and mass and matter are there in the universe?” We have this big number and we know what that number is but we can only actually see and observe this tiny little fraction of it, of all known matter. Then there’s dark matter and we’re like, “yeah, we’re not quite sure what that is.” We’ve got some good theories. Then there’s normal energy and then there’s dark energy, it’s like 70% of the universe. “What is that? I don’t know. It’s something, we should figure it out.”

David Read
Something’s going on.

Mika McKinnon
lt’s phenomenal to me that the majority of our universe is composed of something that we have no idea what it is.

David Read
Yeah, my mother, she was a housekeeper for years. She encountered things being thrown around rooms, she encountered ghosts. I had never really believed in any of that. Something is happening, there are things at work around us that we cannot perceive it. We just don’t have the technology to interpret it yet.

Mika McKinnon
There was a show that I recorded as an actual scientist instead of a behind the scenes scientist called Phantom Signals. It aired this past fall, I think on the Space Channel in the US and on maybe Now in Canada, I’m not quite sure. It’s all about looking at all of those things that are these unexplained signals in the universe. What are all the various theories of it? What’s the science behind some of them? So, if you’re curious about that, I actually did a whole big one.

David Read
Absolutely. What’s it called again?

Mika McKinnon
Phantom Signals.

David Read
Okay, absolutely. To go in a little bit of the same direction, throw a curveball at you, do you think we’ve been visited by extraterrestrial life? Do you think?

Mika McKinnon
I think that it is statistically impossible that aliens do not exist. There must be other life elsewhere in the universe. When it comes to visiting our solar system, we’re not a particularly interesting solar system. In the entire universe, we aren’t even like a dusty little town on the side of the road with a big huge donut that you stop by.

David Read
We don’t even have the doughnut?

Mika McKinnon
No, nothing. As far as we can tell, we are a remarkably boring little solar system. Then inside the solar system, Earth is kind of okay, it’s not necessarily the most exciting planet inside our solar system. So I don’t know why anyone would make a pit stop here. When you start talking about the incredible amounts of energy required to get between solar systems, you need really, really good motivation. The hardest thing I’m ever asked to do in any sci-fi series is motivate an intergalactic war because in terms of resources and energy, there’s literally nothing that can motivate that kind of war. It’s the like the equivalent of the Oxford Club where everybody eats one of every single species and animal and plant on the planet. It would have to be an intergalactic version of that where they’re like, “we just want to taste one brain from every creature everywhere so, guess we’re heading to Earth to find some dogs and Giraffes and whatever else and then leave again.” Unless polar bears are a delicacy on an intergalactic scale, I just can’t really justify it. You look at these incredible lengths we go to go rock collecting, other planets could do that as well. There is this very cool feedback mechanism where you think that biology and geology are totally different fields, right? Rocks versus life, not a lot of overlap. Except, we do things like we grow a mineral called appetite inside of our teeth. Oddly enough, not actually named for being hungry.

David Read
I was about to ask.

Mika McKinnon
It’s named for being deceptive so kind of fitting over there. Or that once we got oxygen, we suddenly got all the rust minerals that had never previously existed. There’s an actual evolution of the types of minerals that exist because there has been life. Life has been able to incorporate minerals in ways that have allowed for greater complexity so there’s actually this total intertwined thing. There’s little extremophiles that eat toxic sludge and poop out gold. “Really? What? What? Why?” There are creatures that live several kilometers underground in mineshafts in solid rock. “Oh, okay, if you’re happy I guess.”

David Read
It’s what it does.

Mika McKinnon
We don’t really know what biological processes on other planets would result in what sort of rocks. There could just be an aspect of you’d end up with different geology on different planets and maybe Tanzanite only exists on earth and doesn’t elsewhere. I don’t know.

David Read
That’s an interesting argument you make about us being kind of like a boring place because the Stargate explanation for why the goa’uld would never come back is there’s no naquadah in our solar system to mine. The Gate element is not here, the only thing that’s here is slaves and they’ve got enough of those.

Mika McKinnon
It’s like, “yeah, we’re done. Whatever, been there, done that, moving on.” It’s like Mercury, where you’re just like, “it’s just a big rock.” It’s a little too hot for much to go on. The coolest thing about Mercury is why is it tectonically active and how did it get such a big core? Maybe part of the planet burned off? Maybe it’s like a singed burnt marshmallow of a planet?

David Read
Well, the solar system has been around for what? 4 billion years?

Mika McKinnon
4.6 billion years. Australia and Canada have a fight over who has the oldest rock, so I care about this quite a lot. I will say Canada is winning the argument for oldest rock overall, but Australia’s currently winning for oldest surface rock.

David Read
Uluru? Anywhere near Uluru by any chance? If I was going to look for an Ancient starship I would start at Uluru.

Mika McKinnon
Yeah, just like in the middle of nowhere. We don’t talk about it but nearby there’s a whole bunch of just rocks vertically sticking out of the surface there. It’s bizarre. It’s special. There’s a lot of strange things in the centre of Australia. I went to Coober Pedy which is the underground Opal mining town. I hitched a ride on the back of a mail truck and went circling out into the desert and it turns out you can go hunting for fossilized seashells in the middle of the Australian desert if you’re sufficiently kind to your post to postie.

David Read
Wow. How cool is that?

Mika McKinnon
I recommend it in the later times when we’re allowed to travel again.

David Read
Everything, at some point, was in the bottom of the ocean. It all goes back to the sea.

Mika McKinnon
Atlantis right? We got to start somewhere.

David Read
I have some fan questions.

Mika McKinnon
Okay.

David Read
Are we good on time?

Mika McKinnon
We are. We should probably wrap relatively soon., I can hear the little small monster in the background.

David Read
So we good for five or six more minutes?

Mika McKinnon
Yeah.

David Read
Okay, perfect. Teresa Mc – how realistic is it to think that transporter beam technology may exist?

Mika McKinnon
So, depends if you want the original item or not. This is actually in Star Trek, they talk about this a little bit with the one doctor who refuses to go through transporters. Technically you spread them apart and rebuild an entirely new life form; so you die and are reborn every time you go through a transporter. In that case, we’ve actually managed to pull it off with quantum transportation where we’ve done it on an individual particle level so far. To do it on more than a single particle, well, that’s an engineering problem which really gives us a power supply problema and we probably need to get back to negative energy density again.

Mika McKinnon
Could you make it work in terms of theory? Yes. Could you make it work in terms of actual practical application on our lifespan scales? Not really? Only if you start getting technical like with replicators being actual 3d printers, right?

David Read
Oh boy!

David Read
I’d love to get into that in another episode with you. Jeremy – did you write any of the technobabble that McKay and others speak?

Mika McKinnon
I never wrote anything; I would read things over, I would chat with people. Occasionally, conversations would end up transcribed. But with McKay in particular, this is one of my favorite things. Carl Binder has a daughter who is an astrophysicist and every now and then he’d call up his daughter and propose the latest ridiculousness of the week. She would effectively respond “dad [sighs]” and then explain why it’s wrong. So if you’re ever looking at, between Sheppard and McKay, and wondering about that dynamic, it has an awful lot of exasperated daughter image, that’s why. I love that, it makes me so happy. First of all, because there’s just so many women in science who are involved in Stargate, both on screen and behind the scenes. But also because it makes sense that found family has that relationship that is, at least in part, coming from a real life family.

Mika McKinnon
And it makes sense that the same kind of curious people would be involved on both sides. Elizabeth Lee – how much of the maths on the walls of the Destiny was valid?

Mika McKinnon
All of it. It’s all internally consistent, ot’s all real math. You can go through it and do whatever you want with it. I’ve actually had teachers ask me for screenshots of it and have assigned it to their students. It’s all valid maths, it’s all internally consistent maths and it all has something to do with either plots or occasionally with characters. Sometimes you’ll see handwriting changes as it goes between different characters who are working on their pet projects. Actually, we had a small little incident with my hallway. We were filming out of order at the time. I set it all up, they filmed and then there was a miscommunication. Instead of putting a sealant on it so it can be taken down and put up and taken down and put up, it was erased and washed clean. We’d already filmed enough things that we needed it back for continuity, which is where me being a scientist is very, very handy because I am obsessive and I had it perfectly documented. I was able to go back through and do exact recreations like the same smudging all the way back. It took twice as long to redo it than it did in the first place. Instead of creating it, I had to recreate, in the exact same handwriting sizes and everything. That’s one of my many reference things. I’ve also got reference pages of all the various actor’s handwriting so I can do their handwriting. So if you’ve got an actor out there completing an equation, I’d write the first half, they’d write the second half and we’d see if it all looked the same. I’d have to learn Chloe’s handwriting and Rush’s handwriting, Eli’s handwriting and be able to match it

David Read
Raj – do other dimensions like hyperspace and subspace exist?

Mika McKinnon
Well, we don’t know. String theory does get into the concept of multiple dimensions, the trouble is we’ve never been to them so it’s all very hard to tell. That, again, goes to an engineering question. This is a little bit about why String Theory is kind of misnamed. A theory is something that you can test and you can go “is this true, is this false?” Theory with a big T is like a theory that has been tested repeatedly and it’s still true. With String Theory it’s less about something that you can test because it’s formulated to exactly match what you’re already observing with non-String Theory interpretations. It’s actually more like a lens; it’s like having different filters on your camera, it’s a different way of looking at things. If instead of looking at things as individual particles you look at them as vibrating strings, then you can get the same outcome in the end. You can come up with ways of having “what if there are additional dimensions?” but everything would look exactly the same to us so we can’t tell “the what if?”

David Read
Got it. Last question for you. If you could go anywhere through the Stargate, GateGabber wants to know – where would you like to go and what would you do there?

Mika McKinnon
Because we’re a year into the pandemic, I would want to visit family. I’m in Canada, I am a dual citizen so I can technically cross back and forth but I cannot morally cross back and forth. I’ve got family down south that I haven’t seen that I very much wish to. But if we weren’t in pandemic times…whoa, whoa. Wow, that would be a tough one. So inside our solar system, I would love to go to Titan. It’s a moon with an atmosphere and has methane lakes and dunes and things like that. It would just be fascinating.

David Read
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if we found life on Titan.

Mika McKinnon
Oh yeah, it would just be so so cool. It’s gott haze and weather patterns and all of that. If we’re talking outside the solar system, the TRAPPIST system would be amazing. It’s a whole bunch of planets so close together that they’re like as close as the moon is to the Earth. So if you have life on any one planet, it would like sneeze and infect life onto the other planets. So that would be fascinating. If I had a spaceship that I could go in, I would really love to go to the center of our Milky Way where there’s a nebula that we’re pretty sure has traces of raspberry rum. From our geochemical analysis from a distance, we’re pretty sure it’s got the same basic formula makeup as raspberry rum. I’m like, you know, I taste a lot of rocks. I’d be down with tasting a nebula. I would totally be down with seeing if I could do tasting notes on the rasberry rum at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

David Read
You’re a gamer, have you heard of Elite Dangerous?

Mika McKinnon
No.

David Read
Check out Elite Dangerous. It is a one-to-one scale Milky Way galaxy. It’s a British game, they’ve designed it so that four or five thousand of the systems that exist have been cataloged in the game. It’s set 12,000 years ahead of us but everything is consistent. Flight is very similar, you can go and check out Voyager, it’s most of the way towards the planet that it’s heading towards right now. One of the things that I’m planning on doing is making a pilgrimage to Sagittarius A which is the black hole at the center of the galaxy. So Elite Dangerous, check it out. It’s built using software that has real science principles in it for when it designs the 400 billion star systems that are in our galaxy.

Mika McKinnon
If I was involved in this game, which I’m not, but if I was, what I would then do is do the “Okay, let’s do the extra added layer of raiding the NASA advanced innovative concept grant projects.” These are the NASA fun sci-fi projects where they go “what are the technologies that are 10, 20, 30 years down the line that we can support now to create later?” That includes things like “what if we could do a CubeSat that could go inner intergalactic?” So what if we could set these little tiny satellites up and just shoot them off into space between various solar systems and still be able to communicate with them? What if we could have giant laser guns that we fire at them to keep them going faster and accelerate them close to the speed of light? This is actual technology that we are funding in order to be able to build it 10, 20, 30 years down the line. So just looking at that list of grants and going “okay, what if all of them worked, what else could you find continuing out into the solar system?” Could you get like a little ring circling around all these little CubeSats just firing out and like laser beams coming from Earth being like “speed up, speed up, speed up. My solar sails, push, push, push.”

David Read
The future is so cool.

Mika McKinnon
It’d be fun. It’d be so fun.

David Read
Mika, everyone is begging to have you back. Everyone in the chat is like “please, let’s have Mika back.” I would love to have you back later this year.

Mika McKinnon
I would absolutely have fun with it.

David Read
Thank you so much for coming.

Mika McKinnon
Thank you for having me, always great chatting.

David Read
This was fascinating, always great chatting with you. I’ll email you in a little bit, I’m gonna wrap up the show. You take care of yourself, okay.

Mika McKinnon
Excellent, have a great day.

David Read
Bye bye now. Mika McKinnon everyone. science consultant for Stargate. I apologize, they’re using a nail gun right outside my window. I apologize for that, they are going to town. I’ve been wanting to have Mika on for quite a long time now and she was a delight as she is always. We’ll have to absolutely have her back. Willie Garson is going to be coming up in about 50 minutes at 3pm Pacific Time. Before we wrap things up I want to let you know about our giveaway for this month. Own a piece of the Pegasus Dial Home Device! For the month of February, Dial the Gate is partnering with Empire Movie Props to give away this piece of the DHD from the Atlantis episode Phantoms. To enter to win you need to use a desktop or laptop computer and visit dialthegate.com, scroll down to submit trivia questions. Your trivia may be used in a future episode of Dial the Gate, either for our monthly trivia night, or for a special guest to ask me in a round of trivia. There are three slots for trivia; one easy, one medium, one hard. Only one needs to be filled in but you’re more than welcome to submit up to three. Please note the submission form does not currently work for mobile devices. Your trivia needs to be received before March 1st of 2021, obviously. If you’re the lucky winner I’ll be notifying you via your email right after the start of the new year to get your address. Big thanks to Empire Movie Props for making this item available to a member of our audience. Dial the Gate is brought to you every week for free and we do appreciate you watching but if you want to support the show further, buy yourself some of our themed swag. We’re now offering t-shirts, tank tops, sweatshirts and hoodies for all ages in a variety of sizes and colors at Red Bubble. We currently offer four themed designs and hope to add more in the future. The word cloud designs have both a solid background or transparent background option so you have some flexibility between choosing a light or a dark color. Do keep this in mind when you’re making your selection. Checkout is fast and easy and you can even use your Amazon or PayPal account, just visit dialthegate.redbubble.com and thank you for your support. If you enjoyed this episode, I would really appreciate it if you would click the Like button. It makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm and will definitely help the show grow its audience. Please also consider sharing the video with a Stargate friend and if you want to get notified about future episodes, click that Subscribe icon. Willie Garson. Martin Lloyd himself is going to be joining us on Dial the Gate in about 50 minutes from now, hope you can join us for that episode. I believe this is his first Stargate interview, this is definitely the first time I’ve ever spoken to him. I’ve been rewatching Point of No Return and Wormhole X-Treme! and 200 so join us for your questions for Willie Garson. Thanks again to Mika McKinnon. Thanks so much to my moderating team, Sommer, Tracy, Keith, Jeremy, Rhys. Thanks to Linda “GateGabber” Furey and Jennifer Kirby for helping to make this show possible. I’m David Read, thanks for tuning in to Dial the Gate, we’ll see you on the other side.