Will a wormhole ever be built in the future?
The idea of wormholes and time travel are by far one of the most popular futuristic concepts, eagerly welcomed by the sci-fi community.
Although advanced ideas like the Dyson sphere or antimatter bombs or even light-speed futuristic rockets are very sought after concepts these days, the whole fuss and excitement on the idea of wormholes never gets old. And I can safely say that this is because there's a chance that wormholes could be just more than a mere hypothetical idea - rather a tangible reality, that gives us authority over spacetime!
But before getting way ahead of ourselves here, we need to first look into how much of a chance do we have in turning wormholes into a reality?
Wormholes, also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges, are considered as theoretical spacetime structures that connects two points in spacetime. Their entry portal is thought to be a black hole, and their exit portal a white hole. But there are few yet crucial reasons why their existence in the present reality is not going to happen any time soon.
- Existence of wormholes will disrupt the order of nature. This is a given, because we know that if wormholes are ever to be built, it'll open up a whole new bunch of opportunities for time travel! But we haven't had any visits from the time travelers from the future, not any that we're aware of.
- Another problem that this concept faces is the introduction of something called "exotic matter". This is a hypothetical type of matter that is believed to have a negative energy density, unlike ordinary matter that has positive energy density. Every observable matter in this universe has a positive energy density, which exerts gravitational attractive force on every other object. But in the case of exotic matter, gravitational force is going to be repulsive, because of its negative energy density.
- There has been no direct evidence for the existence of exotic matter in our universe, which makes it even more complicated to built a wormhole. A stable traversable wormhole can only be built with the help of exotic matter, so that it won't collapse into itself to form a normal black hole. The repulsive properties of this exotic matter will prevent the wormhole from closing in and will enable it for traversing or traveling.
- But even of we somehow manage to supply the wormhole with enough exotic matter, in order to travel through the wormhole, we'd have to travel at the speed of light to reach our destination. And from Einstein's Relativity, we know that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light!
But all of these arguments are valid only if we look through the perspective of our current physical models and laws. We still don't have a unified theory which explains all of the forces and interactions of the universe in one go. So, we'll have to wait for the future to see what happens with our current understandings of spacetime and the universe.
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