Science 3 min read

How to Build a Wormhole? Here's a Step-By-Step Guide

Rost9 / Shutterstock.com

Rost9 / Shutterstock.com

As far as space is concerned, it is so big that any of our most powerful spacecraft won’t go far. It’s not possible even with all the time in the world — literally!

When we venture into space and head toward far-flung destinations of the cosmos, we could run out of two essential things, time or fuel. It doesn’t matter how fast our space vehicle can go either; light itself isn’t fast enough!

The closest planetary system to us, the Alpha Centauri, lies at over 4.3 light-years!

Meaning, it will take you 4.3 years to get there if you’re traveling at the speed of light. But, the journey to Alpha Centauri may take about 100 years if your spacecraft travels at an average velocity of approximately 13,411 km/s.

To venture into interstellar space, we need faster-than-light (FTL) modes of travel. Something similar to popular sci-fi films’ warp drives, but all should be operating within the fundamental principles of physics.

One of the fascinating natural structures in the Universe are wormholes that, in popular culture, are the go-to FTL travel method. Now, we have a simple recipe for constructing a wormhole, but the ingredients are so rare!

Here’s What You Need to Make a Functioning Wormhole

Harnessing space oddities like wormholes will make the furthest reaches of Universe accessible to human exploration.

The math in the theory of general relativity predicts the existence of wormholes. But, while astrophysicists believe the said phenomenon does exist, they are yet to discover one.

Another space oddity predicted by Einstein is black holes, which you can bet they exist because now we have a picture as substantial evidence! Black holes can serve as the two ends of a cosmic tunnel, or a wormhole, according to a new paper.

A team of astrophysicists thought of a way to create a traversable and stable cosmic wormhole in the fabric of space-time.

Basically, you need a pair of oppositely charged black holes connected by what they call cosmic strings stretching to infinity, and voilà! You now have an almost-steady wormhole that stays stable long enough and doesn’t collapse until the message, or the thing, passes through safely.

Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University, explained the concept in a Live Science article:

“Cosmic strings are theoretical defects, similar to the cracks that form when ice freezes, in the fabric of space-time…”

These cosmic strings hold the tunnel of the wormhole together and keep the two oppositely charged black holes from getting attracted to each other.

“The inherent vibrations in the cosmic strings pull energy, and therefore mass, away from the string, making it smaller and smaller. Essentially, over time the cosmic strings wiggle themselves into oblivion, with complete collapse of the wormhole not far behind. But the kludged-together wormhole may stay stable long enough to allow messages or even objects to travel down the tunnel and actually not die, which is nice.”

The preprint paper, Traversable Asymptotically Flat Wormholes with Short Transit Times, is available at arXiv.org.

Read More: Humanity Goes Extinct Without FTL Travel (we may Have Found it)

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Zayan Guedim

Trilingual poet, investigative journalist, and novelist. Zed loves tackling the big existential questions and all-things quantum.

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    Trayvonn Williams December 17 at 9:30 pm GMT

    I want to test if possible that you can time travel while going to a different dimension.

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      soul melodies March 21 at 12:03 pm GMT

      This is one of an incredible buh adventurous test

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