Maybe you can. Wormholes are grounded in real physics and are considered theoretically, if not practically, possible. But previous recipes for creating a wormhole required various configurations of black holes; not only does nobody know how to make these, they would require an enormous amount of material (think the masses of stars and galaxies) to produce regardless – not something we are likely to have at our command anytime soon. Six years ago, Matt Visser (one of the authors of the current paper) and his colleague David Hochberg showed that in order to stay open, wormholes could also be formed with a substance dubbed “exotic matter” as well as black holes. Even though exotic matter is right up there with unicorns as far as being actually sighted, Visser’s work DID show a way to create a wormhole without a black hole. This was progress.
Now Vissar and his collegues have published new calculations that show a wormhole can be opened with an arbitrarily small amount of exotic matter. If the wormhole is designed carefully, “the total quantity of ANEC-violating matter can be made infinitesimally small.” So even if we currently don’t have a clue as to how to make or obtain exotic matter, we may only need the merest speck to make warp dreams come true…
Wow, this type of discovery is really exciting. I have no doubt that before the 21st century is over, a means will be found to travel faster than light – either thru traversible wormholes, Alcubiere Warp Drives, or some other exotic means. I believe the thing impeding its development isn’t ultimately improbably technical developments, but lack of sufficient intelligence.
By the end of the 21st Century, assuming we are not extinct, our post-human hyper-intelligent selves will figure out a way.
Planet P Blog
We seem quite intelligent enough to understand things beyond our ability to create. I think we don’t need more intelligence, only the recipe. We need to first figure out what “exotic matter” is. If modern physics knows what it is, we should also have a definition of the composition of the material. Assembly of the proper combination of quarks, etc, is then a matter of proper engineering after testing various ways to create components.
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