Wormhole to a distant planet
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By now most of us have heard about wormholes. They are the magical tunnels that connect dimensions and may effect time travel. They are also said to be a shortcut through the universe. Whether any or all of these statements are true has yet to be proven. There are other types of wormholes such as those made when sand and oil is extracted from the earth, but they are purely natural and nothing more than channels.

In theory there are wormholes that are capable of allowing us to travel through the universe to places that we could never reach without these shortcuts. Albert Einstein stated that we could not travel faster than the speed of light. He has been right on almost everything but is he right on this point? If he is, wormholes may be our only way of fast travel. Actually we wouldn't be going faster than light but we would be taking a shorter route. Think about a train trip that has to go around the Rocky Mountains to a certain destination in California and how long that would take, now think about a different train trip to the same destination that goes through a tunnel and through the Rocky Mountains. We certainly would arrive faster but we may not be traveling any faster.

Wormholes are said not only to be tunnels in the normal sense of the word but they bend space and time. I bet you are wondering how many wormholes have been discovered to date? The answer is a resounding none. This doesn't mean that they don't exist, it could just mean that we don't yet have the means to identify one. It could also be that we have seen them but thought that they were something else. What if they look like stars when viewed head on? How could we distinguish them? Some scientists say that a search for Negative Mass wormholes should be conducted and that it would produce a double spiked object due to gravitational lensing if the Massive Compact Halo Object ( http://wwwmacho.mcmaster.ca/ (North America) ) was used.

Believe it or not, quantum physics proves that a region of space can contain LESS than nothing. On the face of it, this is a bizarre statement to say the least. You would think that if you take everything out of something you are left with an empty vacuum. It is thought that when negative energy ( not antimatter ) or mass bends space that many strange arrangements are possible. Many time machine theories are based on these events. If these theories are correct and we can somehow use wormholes to travel back in time than we have to deal with paradoxes. The usual one is if you travel back in time and kill your great great grandfather, will you still be born? Many say no, while others say you would not be able to accomplish this act no matter how hard you tried. It certainly is an intriguing puzzle.

One of the biggest problems one would have if he or she could create a wormhole, would be to stabilize it. It seems that wormholes would have a tendency to pinch off and vanish. There is a scientist in Russia that thinks he has solved that problem, his name is Sergei V. Krasnikov of the Central Astronomical Observatory in Pulkovo, Russia. He said he did it by inventing a new type of wormhole. It is a wormhole with a puckered tunnel. It requires no exotic matter to maintain his wormhole. This would certainly be a step forward in understanding wormhole production

If we do find that wormholes exist, then we may get more than we bargained for. It might also mean that parallel universes exist. If anyone has ever seen the tv show Sliders they know what I mean. A parallel universe is a place when you might find different versions of the worlds that exist in our universe. This could include a different version of yourself. Events may have transpired differently on these parallel worlds so these worlds could be either more advanced or less advanced versions. They could also be free or under a dictatorship or perhaps even dinosaurs still exist there. The possibilities boggle the mind. What else might we find? That is a good question. We really can't be sure. Maybe the very nature of people would be different or opposite from us. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were other earths where the people all got along and there were no wars and no poverty? Pipe dream, maybe but who knows.

If we do discover how to create a wormhole will some alien race be waiting for us with a brass band, ready to welcome us to the interstellar community or will they just blow us out of space because they think that as a race we are just too dangerous? Probably neither. If we can create wormholes then we should be able to create them anywhere in space unless there is some restriction that we don't know about yet. How we would make them go where we want is yet another problem. Maybe the length of the wormhole would determine this. What I mean is that maybe each inch of a worm hole will equal a certain distance. Lets say a wormhole is 10 feet long and each foot is equal to a distance of 1 light year. We might be able to aim the wormhole at a star system 10 light years distant and there we would be in about one second.

Lets hope that with the advent of more powerful telescopes and the launching of more powerful probes we detect a natural wormhole soon.