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Warp Speed, Hyperspace and Wormholes

Updated on April 25, 2010
Wormhole Travel
Wormhole Travel
Rings of Vega (artist's rendition)
Rings of Vega (artist's rendition)

When Fast Just Aint Good Enough

It's an understatement to say that the universe is big. It's huge! It's huger than huge — it's GARGANTUAN!!!!! Dang it, even that strong adjective in bold caps followed by multiple exclamation points is not able to describe the ginormousness of space. The fact is, there are no words in human language to truly capture the enormity of the universe. "Infinite" is the closest but it just sounds so meager.

So, when you face the facts that it takes over four years traveling at light speed just to get to the nearest star from our Sun, you have to ask:

How in the heck is mankind gonna go anywhere when, according to physics, the fastest anything can go is the speed of light?

I don't know about you, but I would like to be alive and kicking when I reach the planetary satellites of Vega to wade through the lovely methane seas (hypothetical) while gazing at the Vegan rings 25 light years away from home.

Well, it may be impossible to travel faster than the speed of light but fret not my future intergalactic friends; in the limiting laws of physics there are loopholes, or should I say.....wormholes.

Read on, together we will step through the looking glass and discover the secrets of the universe.

Schwarzschild Metric

See all those pretty numbers and symbols up there? That has something do do with wormholes but I have absolutely no idea what they mean!

Why do they have to make theoretical astrophysics on hypothetical astronomical objects so darn complicated?

Wormhole 101

Get a piece of paper. Got it? Good. Draw a dot on each end of that piece of paper. Label one dot "Point A" and the other "Point B". Now, what is the fastest way to get from "Point A" to "Point B"? Common sense and the old adage says "a straight line", but that is not the case.

Fold that piece of paper in half so that "Point A" and "Point B" touch each other. That is the fastest way from "Point A" to "Point B". That is Wormhole 101!

Basically, a wormhole is a distortion in space (natural or man-made) that connects two points of space or time.

Warp Speed and Hyperspace

I gotta tell ya, I am having a hard time finding on the Internet a simple way to define this. So I will define warp speed and hyperspace the way I understand them. If I am wrong, then I am sure I will hear about it!

Basically, warp speed and hyperspace are manual ways to distort the space around a ship. This theoretical mode of transportation shrinks the space in front of the ship while expanding the space behind it, thus propelling the ship to a distant point in the universe using the very space around said ship.

So, the way this works is that the space in front of the ship almost disappears and the space behind it expands. The disappearing front allows for less space for the ship to travel while at the same time the expanding space behind the ship propel the ship to the destination point. This uses two methods of transport simultaneously.

I think my brain just exploded!

working

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