Chapter 133: Crossing the Wormhole

While a light-year is a vast distance by everyday standards, it is not particularly staggering when measured against interstellar scales. The diameter of our Milky Way galaxy is roughly one hundred thousand times that distance. If a wormhole were to exist between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy—some 2.2 million light-years away—it would be, in terms of scale, merely a tiny, slender passage. Could such channels truly exist in our surrounding interstellar space, yet remain undiscovered? The answer is no.

The truly astonishing aspect of a wormhole with a radius of one light-year is not its size, but the amount of negative energy matter required to sustain it. Calculations indicate that the quantity of negative energy matter needed to maintain such a wormhole is equivalent to one hundred times the total mass of all luminous stars in the entire Milky Way.

The gravitational effects produced by such a wormhole would be far more significant than those of the entire galaxy. If such a wormhole existed in our local interstellar neighborhood, the motion of matter within millions of light-years would be noticeably affected, and we would have long since detected its presence through its gravitational field.

Therefore, not only is it impossible to construct a traversable wormhole on Earth, but it is also virtually impossible for one to exist in our nearby interstellar space without having been detected.

This leaves us with only one remaining possibility to discuss: Is it possible for traversable wormholes to exist in other, far-flung corners of the universe? We may never know the answer to this question for certain, as the universe is simply too vast. However, the almost astronomical amount of negative energy matter required to maintain an observable wormhole provides us with a near-definitive answer. To date, humanity has never discovered negative energy matter on any macroscopic scale; all experimental methods for generating it rely on weak quantum effects. To sustain a traversable wormhole, there would need to be some mechanism to aggregate the faint negative energy matter produced by quantum effects into a sufficient quantity.

But can negative energy matter be aggregated? Physicists have conducted theoretical research into this, and the results suggest that it is impossible to aggregate negative energy matter produced by quantum effects without limit. The more negative energy matter that is gathered, the shorter the time it can exist. Consequently, a wormhole without negative energy matter is unstable, but one with too much is also unstable! What kind of wormhole could then be stable? Preliminary calculations indicate that only wormholes with dimensions twenty-plus orders of magnitude smaller than an atom are stable.

These results are undeniably harsh. If they hold true, the possibility of traversable wormholes is essentially ruled out, rendering all those beautiful science fiction stories mere illusions. Fortunately—or unfortunately—many of the aforementioned results are based on physical theories that are still at the frontier of science, and thus relatively immature. Whether future research will fundamentally shake these theories and completely overturn the results described here remains an unknown. Furthermore, even if those physical theories are largely correct, many of the results mentioned are merely approximations or special cases derived from those theories.

For instance, many results assume wormholes are spherically symmetric, whereas in reality, they could take on other shapes. Wormholes of different geometries would require different amounts of negative energy matter and would exert varying levels of tension. All of this suggests that even if those physical theories are true, the conclusions we have drawn are not necessarily absolute.

The method to open one is through resonance, utilizing the principle of mutual attraction between matter to allow the positive and negative energy of the two space-time wormhole apertures to attract one another, thereby opening it; however, these two forms of energy are light energy and dark energy.

After acknowledging the existence of extraterrestrials, the renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking made another startling statement. In a documentary, he discussed time travel, suggesting that a "time machine" is not scientifically impossible. For example, if a spacecraft could travel through the universe at speeds approaching the speed of light, it would allow passengers on board to enter the future. He pointed out that inside the Large Hadron Collider beneath Switzerland, humans have already accelerated particles to near-light speed.

"Wormholes" are all around us. While filming a documentary about the universe, Hawking noted that there are roughly two ways to enter the future. The first is through so-called "wormholes." Hawking emphasized that wormholes are everywhere, merely too small to be seen by the naked eye; they exist in the cracks of space and time. Just as there are tiny fissures in 3D space, there are also fine cracks in time, and the space smaller than molecules and atoms is termed "quantum foam," within which wormholes reside.

However, Hawking indicated that these tunnels are too small for humans to traverse. Yet, one day, we might be able to capture a wormhole and magnify it infinitely, or perhaps build a massive one in the future.

Hawking pointed out that, theoretically, time tunnels or wormholes could not only take humans to other planets, but if the two ends of a wormhole were located at the same position and separated by time rather than distance, a spacecraft could fly in and, upon exiting, still be near Earth, but having entered the so-called "distant past." However, Hawking also noted that a time machine cannot return to the past, as doing so would violate fundamental causality.

Additionally, Hawking stated that if scientists could build a spacecraft capable of reaching speeds near the speed of light, the ship would inevitably experience time dilation—since it cannot violate the law that the speed of light is the maximum speed limit—meaning one week of flight would equal 100 years on the ground, effectively flying into the future.

The fastest manned vehicle in history is Apollo 10, which reached 25,000 miles per hour. But to travel through time, one would need to go more than 2,000 times faster. It would require a massive machine capable of carrying a vast amount of fuel. The spacecraft would continuously accelerate, and within a week, it could reach the outer planets. Two years later, it could reach half the speed of light and exit the solar system. Two years after that, it would reach 90% of the speed of light, approximately 30 trillion miles from Earth. Four years after launch, the ship would begin to traverse the future. For every hour that passes on the ship, two hours would pass on Earth.

After another two years of full-throttle travel, the ship would reach its maximum speed—99% of the speed of light. At this speed, one day on the ship would equal one year on Earth. At this point, the ship would truly have flown into the future.

Other physicists support Hawking's theory, including Brian Cox, a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester. Cox stated: "When particles are accelerated using the Large Hadron Collider to 99% of the speed of light, the time experienced by the particles passes at 1/7000th the rate of our time. Decades in space might correspond to 2.5 million years having passed on Earth."

Regrettably, the theories regarding wormholes have not yet been experimentally confirmed.

Recent scientific data from NASA indicates that black holes might very well be wormholes leading to other universes. If this is true, it could help resolve a quantum puzzle known as the black hole information paradox. However, critics argue that this might also raise new questions, such as how wormholes are formed in the first place.

A black hole is a celestial object with an internal gravitational field so powerful that even light cannot escape. Einstein's general theory of relativity posits that black holes form when matter is compressed into an extremely small space. Although black holes cannot be observed directly, astronomers have identified many objects that are likely black holes, primarily based on observations of the matter orbiting them.

Thibault Damour, an astrophysicist at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France, and Sergey Solodukhin of Jacobs University Bremen in Germany, believe these black hole candidates could be structures known as wormholes.

A wormhole is a curved passage connecting two different points in the fabric of space-time. If you imagine the universe as a two-dimensional sheet of paper, a wormhole is the "throat" passage connecting that sheet to another. In this scenario, the other sheet could be a separate universe, possessing its own stars, galaxies, and planets. Damour and Solodukhin studied the potential characteristics of wormholes and were surprised to find them so similar to black holes that it is almost impossible to distinguish between the two.

Matter orbits a wormhole in the same way it orbits a black hole, because both distort the space-time around them in the same manner. Some have proposed using Hawking radiation to differentiate them—Hawking radiation refers to light and particle emissions from a black hole, which possess characteristic energy spectra. However, this radiation is so faint that it might be completely overwhelmed by other sources, such as the cosmic microwave background radiation leftover from the Big Bang, making the observation of Hawking radiation nearly impossible.

Another potential difference is that wormholes might lack the event horizon that black holes possess. This means that matter could enter a wormhole and potentially exit again. In fact, theorists suggest that one type of wormhole could be self-folding, meaning it would not lead to another universe, but rather return to its own entrance.

Even so, there is no simple way to test this. Due to the specific geometry of wormholes, it might take billions of years for matter to emerge after falling in. Even if a wormhole were perfectly formed, the oldest wormholes in the universe have yet to "spit out" any matter.

It seems there is only one way to explore a black hole in astronomy: to take a brave leap. This is undoubtedly a dangerous game for the courageous, because if one jumps into a black hole, its powerful gravitational field would tear every atom of our bodies apart; even if one were lucky enough to enter a wormhole, the intense gravity inside would remain lethal.

Assuming you could survive, and the wormhole happened to be asymmetric, you might find yourself on the other side of another universe. Before you could even see clearly, the wormhole might just suck you back into the entrance of the universe from which you departed.