One possibility is simply that the gates find one of the virtual wormholes that exist on the Planck-scale and blow it up to macroscopic size. So the gate mechanism somehow fishes one up from the quantum foam, expands it, keeps it open and finally drops it back into the foam. That ability suggests a lot of other cool and frightening possibilities for the gate-builders. Gates into stars would provide enormous energy or explosive power - consider opening a gate into a neutron star. One could even go further and open gates into the interior region of black holes; exactly what would happen is anybody's guess (I would guess the gate breaks down like the evaporation of an equally sized black hole, but maybe you could get a thunderbolt singularity - http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9207105 ). And maybe with the right command codes gates could be opened into arbitrarily contorted spacetimes.

Sepherim wrote:

That could explain why sometimes the gate can't dial again the same location it once used before. If it uses pre-existing wormholes, instead of creating them, it would depend on the continued existance of those holes to be able to dial again into them. No?

If they use Planck-scale wormholes then there are probably already wormholes linking every location with every other. But I would suspect there are other constraints: the probability of finding a wormhole to somewhere else may go down exponentially with distance (say). So the gate must search harder for certain links, and might timeout. But maybe the wormholes actually used are indeed pre-made: when the gate system was set up the creators randomly generated quantum-scale links to all conceivable destinations. They could be just like qubits, and actually used up each time a link is opened. Normally there are enough links around to allow access, but sometimes the system runs out of them (and maybe has to do a search for new ones, or deliver a "wormhole seed" from another gate).

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One could even go further and open gates into the interior region of black holes; exactly what would happen is anybody's guess.

I love the idea of quantum foam wormholes being blown up to be workable (Actually I looked into this wayyy back when, back when they were thinking of keeping the hole open using the casimir effect.) But I guess the question about opening a wormhole in a black hole: Would the quantum foam be stable enough in such extreme conditions to even spawn a wormhole aperture considering how squished it would be (or does that break down at plank's length levels?) ... I mean the pure idea of leaving a wormhole open in a neutron star to use as a power core is badass enough but opening a wormhole in a black hole might actually pull everything around in it. So I almost hope it's impossible just because of the pure destructive possibilities. Thinking further opening a gate to a black hole, neutron star or (gods forbid) a quasar while the gate is in the sun might actually be the closest thing to a practical star killing weapon...uhg, I might have trouble sleeping tonight just knowing that this can theoretically exist.