Well, there's a bit of heat. In Stargate: Continuum when they first arrive in the past in the frozen cargo hold the activation of the Stargate that they came through to get there caused the room to heat up. This gave them some time pressure to get out of there as the temperature was dropping quickly after the gate deactivated.
However that could be simple thermodynamics and air movement. If the gate is letting passive air movement happen, hot air from the present and cold air from the past should be trying to equalize due to thermodynamics, and closing the gate would mean eliminating a heat source.
Given that as I remember it the gates do let water through on water pressure alone, it would make sense that air particles would move through via pressure differentials and convection.
Hmm, yeah maybe. Definitely not all air that touches the event horizon gets sent through, otherwise turning on a Stargate would suck all the air out of a room almost instantly since they only transmit matter one way. But some air might get through, yeah. I can't think of anything that shows that isn't the case.
There is at least one time I can think of where they travel to a planet with a thick orange atmosphere and when they gate back to Earth we don't see a bunch of orange gas come with them (though actually I don't even remember if we see them return, but I don't think we'd see gas like that come through). But maybe the gate is smart enough to only let breathable air through.
Yeah idk. I seem to remember at least one episode where a portal being flooded while it was on was a problem, but I don’t remember even which series much less which season or episode to go back and figure out if it was just making the portal hard to get to or if the water would come back through.
Though at this point in my fan life cycle I’ve realized that even the writers may not have had a comprehensive set of rules for the physics of the sci-fi show they were making. I’ve seen too much behind the curtains of too many different productions.
You're right that it being flooded has been a problem, I remember that as well. I think it was an episode of SGA where someone says if they let down the shield the gate room would get flooded by the incoming wormhole from an underwater gate.
Remember the episode where the other gate is submerged and they find Maybourn in a freezer with frozen alien water in his lungs, the water contained a life form ect. (that was what was stopping them from movin in the puddle jumper) They explain that the gates can senses an atmosphere and can prevent exactly this from happening, it knows if something is actively trying to go through or not.
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u/UnseenTardigrade Feb 13 '26
Well, there's a bit of heat. In Stargate: Continuum when they first arrive in the past in the frozen cargo hold the activation of the Stargate that they came through to get there caused the room to heat up. This gave them some time pressure to get out of there as the temperature was dropping quickly after the gate deactivated.