What If We Could Build Wormholes? | Unveiled

What If We Could Build Wormholes?

The universe places certain limits on what we’re able to accomplish with technology. For one, we know that no matter how fast we can get our engines to propel us, it can never be faster than the speed of light. And it’s widely agreed that we can’t travel back in time because of reality-splitting conundrums like the grandfather paradox. But what would happen if there was a way to bypass these restrictions?

This is Unveiled and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if we could build wormholes?

Wormholes are a popular theme in science fiction, and for good reason, because they actually are a possibility in mathematics - with two varieties proposed. Lorentzian wormholes are perhaps what we tend to picture when thinking about the phenomenon; structures that deal with general relativity and the bending of time and space. Euclidean wormholes are the second type, though; inherently strange because they exist in what some call “imaginary time” at the quantum level… but it has been suggested that they could in some way explain the birthing of new “baby” universes, and could also fit somewhere into string theory, our current best theory for everything.

But, today, we’re going to focus on the arguably less theoretical of the two highly theoretical options; Lorentzian wormholes, or Einstein-Rosen bridges. Our initial ideas on wormholes largely came from Einstein’s theory of general relativity and space-time. Einstein showed that space-time bends under massive objects, and that black holes bent it indefinitely and maybe infinitely. The thought of connecting two such densities brought about the idea of a wormhole, or a bridge connecting two areas in space-time. It’s easiest to picture this by imagining an actual worm eating a tunnel through an apple instead of crawling around it. In this way, a wormhole can be thought of as an alternative route between any two areas in space-time - allowing us to travel between those places potentially much more quickly than a traditional journey would.

Physicists like Stephen Hawking have said that working wormholes may not be possible because of their inherent instability. It’s thought they’d need to be built out of a so-called “exotic matter” with a seemingly impossible “negative energy density”. However, a solution might again lie in the murky world of quantum physics, where the negative mass required might reside.

Clearly there’s a lot of very advanced, very weird science and engineering to work through for these things ever to become a reality, but if humans really were able to one day construct wormholes as we please, it would open up a literal universe of possibilities. The breakthrough would be unrivalled. It would fix, or more accurately bypass, the speed-of-light speed limit imposed on us by the universe. Right now, nothing with mass, which is everything we can see, can move as fast as the speed of light. Meanwhile, some galaxies are travelling away from us faster than the speed of light thanks to the rapid expansion of the universe, which means that there are entire galaxies we will never be able to reach or see by conventional means. In terms of what’s physically accessible, our skies are actually becoming less and less populated….

With wormholes, though, we can potentially cheat this law by literally going around it and creating shortcuts between any two places in space-time. We could travel to any place in the universe we want to and arrive there effectively faster than light - even to places that we can’t actually currently see or comprehend. Exceptionally vast distances would be reduced to very manageable journeys; Voyages to other planets in distant galaxies would be the reality; humans could feasibly move to and from other earth-like, habitable worlds to expand civilization and search for other signs of life. At a basic level, a universe marked by wormholes would suddenly be so much more explorable. If there are aliens to discover, we would surely do so. And if there really is an edge to the universe, then we’d surely reach it.

All of that considered, the actual building of these physics-busting space-structures would be the ultimate skill to have. Any one person or group capable of building a wormhole would find themselves with an infinite list of “where to go next” and an infinite number of businesses and governments vying for their time. On a larger scale, if humans were to develop wormhole tech independently (that is, without the help of some other advanced, extraterrestrial race of the future), then we and Earth would suddenly find ourselves in a universal position of authority - connecting entire star systems via mind-bending methods that we had developed. Quite what such a position of power would do the human psyche is anyone’s guess…

The business wouldn’t be without its major problems and dangers, though. The very first wormhole builders and travellers would have had to have placed themselves into impossibly perilous positions. Our current predictions for what would happen to matter entering into a wormhole are not encouraging, with most proposing that anything going in would be destroyed in a matter of seconds. Those issues will’ve been worked out in a hypothetical time when we’re actually building working wormholes, but probably not before plenty of mistakes, unique injuries and ruthless fatalities.

Once they’ve become the norm, and if we found a way to keep them open indefinitely, however, wormholes would quickly become “space ports” - like today’s airports but linking us to other planets instead of other cities. Gradually we’d see whole space-faring communities emerge around wormhole exits and entrances, offering services to passing travellers, a place to rest or even a place to lay down roots and build a home. Similar to how, across history, we’ve scaled our own planet by establishing road systems, shipping routes and flight paths, we’d now be able to plot and map outer space through wormhole location.

The dramatic effects needn’t only be limited to where we could or couldn’t go, though; we could also think about when. According to some theories, wormholes might offer a solution to time travel. It’s not thought it would be time travel in the sci-fi sense of just choosing a year and warping… More a version of time travel that could only be used within the laws of nature to go as far back as to when the first wormholes were invented. It’s a complex process involving the moving of either the entry or exit point of a wormhole to another place in the universe at a fraction of the speed of light, and then stepping back through it to “travel back in time”, but it does offer a variation of time travel that isn’t dogged by paradoxes! Build enough of these types of set-up, and eventually (theoretically) we could have endless, accessible routes backwards and forwards through time. And from there, the possibilities really do appear infinite!

In the simplest sense, though, a network of wormholes would mean that we’d never find ourselves trapped or cornered. The future of Earth is difficult to predict, but it is likely that our planet will face multiple cataclysmic events between now and its end. And even if it doesn’t, then the sun is scheduled to burn it up in around five billion years when it becomes a red giant. Not even that would worry us were wormholes a reality, though, because we could just jet off somewhere safer. In fact, we may have all already left Earth a long time before these events even pass, in favour of some other, supposedly even more suitable, distant planet. In this way, these theoretical structures have the potential to save the human species in general. We’d now only ever be at the mercy of our environment if the universe itself were to end. But, even then, perhaps we’d be advanced enough to build a “wormhole 2.0”, to send us to another universe; one in which the time isn’t running out. And that’s what would happen if we could build wormholes.