Except for all the details, it's more or less correct. Though if you want to have actual control over your destination, you have to create your own wormhole.
This is, many would say, impossible.
Wormholes large enough for macroscopic objects to pass through are very unstable, they require a force to keep them open. Ideally antigravity, exerted by some form of exotic matter.
This, many would say, is equally impossible.
Then you have to make sure that each opening is affixed to objects rather than points of space. Or else you would immediately lose your wormhole as the Earth spins away from it.
This is, many would now insist, absolutely impossible.
Now, affix one end to the inside of a spaceship and speed away from Earth, accelerating to near the speed of light. Due to special relativity, time passes for an object at speed slower than for an object that is relatively slower or stationary. As a result, a journey fifty light-years out and back (a round trip of 100 light-years) would take over one hundred years from the point of view of observers on Earth, but for the travellers on board with the wormhole, only a few years will have passed. The wormhole has only aged a few years, and subsequently the other side is the same age, too: one hundred years in the past.
This, it can be explained patiently, is also impossible.
As a result, the experimenters left on Earth (who may not live to see the space ship return) would know of their success when, only a few years in, their old colleagues and a bunch of their unborn descendants emerge from their wormhole to go back home and to see the world before they were born, respectively.
This, even if the rest were true, which it isn't, is patently impossible, say the doubters.
Both ends of the wormhole now move through time at the normal rate, but one century apart. There is now free travel between two points of human history one hundred years apart, benefiting humanity with the knowledge of one hundred years of future history, with all the causality violations and temporal cross-contamination of culture that this will bring.
This, many claim, is not merely impossible but clearly insane. Lunch, anyone?
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Last edited by Bullet Magnet; 02-18-2011 at 05:27 AM..
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