Hypothetical Space Travel System: Wormholes

[Gil Hamilton]

Last night, I was thinking about a system of time travel that involved wormholes. Not really DS9 style ones, but something a little similar.

The premise of them starts out like most wormholes in that you have a poke in space that connects two different points in space not directly next to each other that allows travel from Point A to Point B without crossing the intervening distance.

However, the kink to this is that in addition to connecting Point A and Point B, they connect Time A and Time B in a similar fashion, with Time A being the present. Time B in this case is determined by the distance between Point A and Point B. The ratio is straight forward; Time B is one year in the future for every lightyear between Points A and B. In other words, if you open a wormhole at Point A and the exit end Point B is five lightyears away, then Time B is five years after Time A. Exactly the speed of light, in other words

What makes this interesting for future scientists exploring this is that transit time relative to the person or ship or whatever traversing the wormhole is instantaneous. However long it takes them to fly across the event area of the wormhole is the all the travel time experienced. However, from the point of view of everyone else, an object entering the wormhole disappears from existance and and reappears some time in the future based on how far they travelled. They dubbed this condition "Out of the Loop".

Further, these wormholes are one directional, like a waterslide. You can only enter Point A and you can only exit Point B. You can't travel back into Point B. Furthermore, this method cannot be used to travel back in time, because the solution to that involves travelling a negative distance in absolute terms.

The ramifications of this are that local use of wormholes are very much like instant travel. Such a system would make travelling to the Moon or within most parts of the solar system very quick and easy indeed, as an object traversing the wormhole would only be Out of the Loop for a very brief amount of time. Such travel would make the rest of the solar system extremely accessable. Even commutable; potentially you could take a wormhole from a station near your apartment in Brooklyn and commute to Mars where your office is located.

Interstellar missions would still take many years, but on the positive side of it, the ship or space probe or whatever wouldn't experience any travel time except what ever time spent during their mission. This would greatly cut down on the amount of supplies and fuel and other logistical concerns of interstellar missions. You don't have to put your crew in some sort of statis or have them live in a tin can for potentially many years just getting there and back. From Earth's prospective it takes a while, but for the crews perspective, it's relatively short.

I also imagine this to be a popular way of travel to the future. Set up a wormhole to a point 300 light years away, pop out, turn around, and pop back to Earth. Voila - you're six hundred years in the future from where you started.

One thing to consider is that you've got to take into account that things move in the intermediate time from their current position. You constantly see time traveller stories like in the story "The Time Machine" which take off in London and arrive back in London in the future without moving, even though in a hundred or hundreds of thousands of years, England and indeed the solar system has moved a considerable distance. In that way, if you are trying to open a wormhole to a planet in another solar system, unless you want to spend alot of time flying to it or taking multiple wormholes, you've got to open the wormhole where you expect the planet will be in the future when you emerge. This can be tricky if whatever you are trying to wormhole to doesn't move as predictably as planets and stars, but it pretty far away. You could end up up the proverbial stream without a paddle if you tried to wormhole to a ship which had to do some unexpected manuevering while you were Out of the Loop.


I'm sure this idea has been certainly had before and therefore isn't original to me, even though I fleshed out the idea myself last night during a fit of insomnia, but I wanted to type it out and see what you all thought. Like if there are ramifications that I haven't thought of or if the idea is in some way dumb. Taking in mind that the premise has its One Fairy Tale in it of low cost wormholes.

[SirNitram]

This has popped up here and there, though never with Wormholes.

Manifold Space uses this for getting around the Galaxy. It's also mind-destroyingly nihilistic.

Larry Niven's teleporter short stories feature similar, though you need a 'receiver', usually an automated ship travelling at relativistic speeds.

[Gil Hamilton]

Niven's transit boths also had the considerable problem that the booths had to be relatively close to the same velocity as each other because they conserve energy (as they should) and if you transport from a high velocity booth to a low one, the equivlent amount of kinetic energy is released into the environment. The booth can absorb some of it, but at a certain point, the result are... unfortunate.

You know, that's something consider with these hypothetical wormholes. In terms of practicality, you'd have to match velocities with whatever you were wormholing to, or you'd have serious problems when you arrived. I hadn't considered that, thanks.

[SirNitram]

Niven's transit boths also had the considerable problem that the booths had to be relatively close to the same velocity as each other because they conserve energy (as they should) and if you transport from a high velocity booth to a low one, the equivlent amount of kinetic energy is released into the environment. The booth can absorb some of it, but at a certain point, the result are... unfortunate.

You know, that's something consider with these hypothetical wormholes. In terms of practicality, you'd have to match velocities with whatever you were wormholing to, or you'd have serious problems when you arrived. I hadn't considered that, thanks.

It was thermal energy, actually. This comes up in one of the murder mysteries(The guy with the wife who kept following him), and in the space transit one(They hit Pluto but don't revert, bouncing all the way down to Mercury because it's the only receiver that can handle the energy change from 'dropping'.).

[Gil Hamilton]

It was thermal energy, actually. This comes up in one of the murder mysteries(The guy with the wife who kept following him), and in the space transit one(They hit Pluto but don't revert, bouncing all the way down to Mercury because it's the only receiver that can handle the energy change from 'dropping'.).

That's what I meant by "released into the environment". Should have clarified that. In one of the Ringworld books, they mention that transiting to the surface of Ringworld using a Puppeteer transit disk could have resulted in the equivlent of a thermonuclear explosion due to the vast differences in velocity. Ringworld Engineers, I think.

[Elheru Aran]

The problem with wormholes, IIRC, is that they're very very small... a few mm at most. However, that's what I heard ages ago, so that could've very well changed...

[SirNitram]

The problem with wormholes, IIRC, is that they're very very small... a few mm at most. However, that's what I heard ages ago, so that could've very well changed...

A wormhole can be any size a black hole is. Which has, as you guessed, many problems. The theory runs that if you have a wormhole, and a ridiculous amount of negative energy, you can use that negative energy's anti-gravity effect to push the 'hole' open and negate the nasty effects of the black hole on the person in transit, as well as that pesky time dialation.

[Elheru Aran]

The problem with wormholes, IIRC, is that they're very very small... a few mm at most. However, that's what I heard ages ago, so that could've very well changed...

A wormhole can be any size a black hole is. Which has, as you guessed, many problems. The theory runs that if you have a wormhole, and a ridiculous amount of negative energy, you can use that negative energy's anti-gravity effect to push the 'hole' open and negate the nasty effects of the black hole on the person in transit, as well as that pesky time dialation.

....negative energy?

And I am reminded once again why I never took science classes if I could help it...

[Surlethe]

The problem with wormholes, IIRC, is that they're very very small... a few mm at most. However, that's what I heard ages ago, so that could've very well changed...

A wormhole can be any size a black hole is. Which has, as you guessed, many problems. The theory runs that if you have a wormhole, and a ridiculous amount of negative energy, you can use that negative energy's anti-gravity effect to push the 'hole' open and negate the nasty effects of the black hole on the person in transit, as well as that pesky time dialation.

....negative energy?

And I am reminded once again why I never took science classes if I could help it...

Well, we know matter and energy curve spacetime positively. A black hole is just an extreme example of this. A wormhole, contrastingly, is a region of extreme negative curvature; thus, it only stands to reason negative matter-energy would keep a wormhole running.

[Gil Hamilton]

Keep in mind I'm using the word "wormhole" a bit colloquially. What I'm describing is a hole in space joining two by two points in space/time that doesn't involve exotic molesting of matter and energy. The wormhole part you take with a bit of salt, in other words.

[CoyoteNature]

I have a question(I actually have many questions but just one for now), about the whole negative energy thing.

If positive mass in higher and higher amounts slows spacetime.



Wouldn't then negative mass speed time up?

So if you went through a wormhole you'd end up significantly older then when you went in.

Was thinking you could use a High C transit through the wormhole to counteract the effect if it exists that is.


Also isn't the negative mass energy thing supposed to be repulsive, so how do you deal with that repulsion effect when trying to actually enter a wormhole?

[Patrick Degan]

Interstellar missions would still take many years, but on the positive side of it, the ship or space probe or whatever wouldn't experience any travel time except what ever time spent during their mission. This would greatly cut down on the amount of supplies and fuel and other logistical concerns of interstellar missions. You don't have to put your crew in some sort of statis or have them live in a tin can for potentially many years just getting there and back. From Earth's prospective it takes a while, but for the crews perspective, it's relatively short.

I also imagine this to be a popular way of travel to the future. Set up a wormhole to a point 300 light years away, pop out, turn around, and pop back to Earth. Voila - you're six hundred years in the future from where you started.

A variation of this concept was the basis for Joe Haldeman's The Forever War: Kerr black holes, called "collapsars" in the novel, are used to facilitate galaxy travel to sustain a war between Earth and Aldeberan. Passage across light-years of distance was instantaneous once a ship fell into the collapsar but relativity tended to pile up traveling to and from each stargate, so elaborate records had to be maintained to keep track of the military movements across hundreds of light-years in space and decades/centuries of time. The central character, William Mandela, spends only two years subjective service in the war but winds up more than 1100 years from the era of his birth.

[brianeyci]

Forever War's on my reading list.

Was it Discworld that had the Puppeteers and their teleportation devices? IIRC the teleportation devices were really close to each other, so you jumped from one to the next, but they were arranged like a sidewalk so you could keep teleporting and keep teleporting and keep teleporting and keep teleporting as long as the white circles kept going...

Brian

[Gil Hamilton]

A variation of this concept was the basis for Joe Haldeman's The Forever War: Kerr black holes, called "collapsars" in the novel, are used to facilitate galaxy travel to sustain a war between Earth and Aldeberan. Passage across light-years of distance was instantaneous once a ship fell into the collapsar but relativity tended to pile up traveling to and from each stargate, so elaborate records had to be maintained to keep track of the military movements across hundreds of light-years in space and decades/centuries of time. The central character, William Mandela, spends only two years subjective service in the war but winds up more than 1100 years from the era of his birth.

Hey yeah, I remember The Forever War. That was a damn good book, I need to find my copy and read it again. I liked in that book how he reinlisted in the Army to become an instructor, as promised, but arrived and was immediately reassigned to combat duty thanks to orders that were continually updated before his reinlistment. I also like Haldeman's book "Forever Peace", even though it had nothing to do with "The Forever War".

[Lord Zentei]

A variation of this concept was the basis for Joe Haldeman's The Forever War: Kerr black holes, called "collapsars" in the novel, are used to facilitate galaxy travel to sustain a war between Earth and Aldeberan.

"Collapsar" was one of the candidate names for Black Holes back in the day.

[AK_Jedi]

Here's a way that one could (thoretically) create a system as outlined in the OP.

1. Open a set of wormholes right next to each other.
2. Put one wormhole in a high velocity spacecraft and send it away.

If the spacecraft is traveling at relativistic speeds, the second wormhole will gradually be displaced in time. For example, if the second wormhole were traveling at the speed of light, and in a straight line, There would be a displacement of one year per lightyear.

The only differences between this system and the one in the OP is that the wormholes are two-way, and the second wormhole could be returned to the starting location to create a time machine with no spatial travel involved.

This, of course, assumes that one would be able to create wormholes, and that one would be able to move wormholes.

[Gil Hamilton]

Well, I was thinking both ends were generated at the source. Like if you poke a pencil through a folded sheet of paper. I'm starting to really regret using the word "wormhole" in this thread, because people are focusing more on the word than the ramifications of such a system existing or discussing other things like it in sci-fi.

[Lord Zentei]

Well, I was thinking both ends were generated at the source. Like if you poke a pencil through a folded sheet of paper. I'm starting to really regret using the word "wormhole" in this thread, because people are focusing more on the word than the ramifications of such a system existing or discussing other things like it in sci-fi.

I imagine that the destination hole would appear X years after the departure hole was generated, where X is the distance in ly. Correct?

[Gil Hamilton]

I imagine that the destination hole would appear X years after the departure hole was generated, where X is the distance in ly. Correct?

Yeah, exactly. The exit end appears when the object falls out of it and closes it.

[Lord Zentei]

I imagine that the destination hole would appear X years after the departure hole was generated, where X is the distance in ly. Correct?

Yeah, exactly. The exit end appears when the object falls out of it and closes it.

So the entry hole disappears also immediately after the guy enters?

Sounds like this is to speed-of-light-in-realspace travel as hyperdrive is to warp; with the infinite time dilation as from c: X years contracted to an instant. Kinda. If I have understood it right.