Now, there’s a catch: Blázquez-Salcedo and his team are talking about microscopic wormholes. They’re not exactly traversable by humans, but this is certainly one small step in a new theoretical direction.
The second paper, however, which comes from Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey and Alexey Milekhin from Princeton University, doesexplore the theoretical existence of wormholes large enough for spacetime-surfing humans to squeeze through.
In this case, Maldacena and Milekhin have devised a wormhole that forms in five-dimensional spacetime, also known as the Randall-Sundrum model. These wormholes would look like intermediate-mass black holes to the untrained observer, the authors say.
If you hopped in this kind of wormhole, you’d experience up to 20 g of acceleration—an uncomfortable, albeit survivable amount. But the authors acknowledge some practical limitations with this theory. For example, the wormhole has to be extremely clean—i.e., free from errant particles:
”If particles that fall into the wormhole scatter and lose energy then they would accumulate inside, contributing some positive energy that would eventually make the wormhole collapse back into a black hole.”
The last place anyone traveling through space wants to end up is at the center of a black hole. (Or is it?) They also have to be extremely cold, the researchers write. And then there’s the small problem of actually generating the wormhole in the first place. Maldacena and Milekhin are still working on figuring out how to form one.
The good news? Theoretically, your cross-galaxy trip would only take less than a second. But if your family and friends are tracking your journey from outside the wormhole, they’ll be waiting a long time for it to end. From their perspective, your trip would last tens of thousands of years.
Looks like you’ll have to find your own ride home.
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