Rip in spacetime

[NerdyCavegirl]

Would a rip/thin spot in spacetime, however that crap is supposed to work, release dangerous amounts of ionizing radiation or have any other potential hazards for anyone travelling through it? I'm not sure if there's been any research on this, but I assume there's at least been speculation. Going through a wormhole can't be completely safe. I'm just not sure if it's thought to irradiate potential travellers, disintegrate them, or have effects similar to a black hole.

 

[TheKillerBs]

To be honest, we have no flipping clue as to how safe traveling through a wormhole could be. Or anything else related to wormholes, really. In fact, the only evidence, and I use the word loosely, we have of wormholes even existing is from mathematical models. You can make them as safe or as dangerous as you want them to be, and you'll be fine. No one knows how the bloody things work, or if they even can work.

 

[Zadocfish]

Remember, they don't exist in real life. You can do whatever you want with them. Make them filled with vanilla frosting if you want, it doesn't really matter since there's no established non-theoretical rules or laws on them.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

No one knows.

My thought would be that your main worries would be gravitational forces - especially entering and exiting the hole, hitting the walls (It seems likely the things would have walls made of compressed / twisted space and you could well get smeered if you hit them), and perhaps most worrying - black holes. In theory the things if they do exist would be formed between black holes - you don't want to aim for the black hole and end up instead caught in the event horion of the black hole. Also since you won't know what's at the other end you could end up unable to exit a worm hole because of gravity from a second black hole, or flying into a sun.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Vaporo]

Well, since all of the ideas as to how to create (and hold open) a wormhole in real life rely on bizarre speculative concepts like negative mass, we have absolutely no clue what the exact effects of creating wormhole could be. But there are a ton of theories.

As I understand it (which is to say, I don't really) the only way to realistically hold a spherical wormhole open would be to completely cover it with negative mass, thus rendering it impassible. Which, in a way, could be a good thing. If you passed an object through a spherical wormhole, it could come out distorted. One part of the object would enter (and exit) the wormhole before another part, thus creating stresses within the material and possible causing it to bend. This could be countered by simply creating a wormhole so large that the physical integrity of the object is enough to prevent it from being distorted. But it could be a cool to have a spaceship creak and moan around your character as its hull is stretched and contorted by the effects of passing through such heavily curved spacetime.

The problem of a spherical wormhole being covered by negative mass is solved by making the wormhole into the shape of a cube (technically, a tesseract), with the edges held up by a framework of negative mass. This would allow an object to pass through without worrying about colliding with a wall of negative mass or being distorted by the curvature of spacetime.

Just a quick note: negative mass is not antimatter. An antiparticle has the same mass and energy as a regular particle, just with opposite charges. Negative mass has, well, a mass of less than zero.

But, that's all just theoretical. You could make wormholes do whatever you want because we have absolutely no idea how they would actually work. A realistic wormhole probably wouldn't be radioactive, per se, as that would effectively be adding energy to the universe with no source, but it could obliterate atomic nuclei that are distorted too severely by a wormhole, thus creating radiation (or "negative" radiation from the annihilation of negative mass that makes everything they irradiate colder instead of hotter!)

Black hole effects? Your call. Gravity is essentially just distorted spacetime, which is literally what a wormhole is made of. Your spaceships could generate some kind of "gravity bubble" that keeps gravitational forces from obliterating them. Or, you could just say that your wormholes distort spacetime in a way different from gravity, making travel through them safe.

To answer your question, yes. There are ways to create safely passable wormholes that don't completely contradict real science.

You might be interested in this book:
Time Travel and Warp Drives: A Scientific Guide to Shortcuts through Time and Space: Allen Everett, Thomas Roman: 9780226045481: Amazon.com: Books

 

[kennyc]

Would a rip/thin spot in spacetime, however that crap is supposed to work, release dangerous amounts of ionizing radiation or have any other potential hazards for anyone travelling through it? I'm not sure if there's been any research on this, but I assume there's at least been speculation. Going through a wormhole can't be completely safe. I'm just not sure if it's thought to irradiate potential travellers, disintegrate them, or have effects similar to a black hole.

I will say this once more in response to your 'science' questions. Whatever you want to happen in your story is TRUE if you provide reasonable believable justification for it. It's called suspension of disbelief. Fiction is NOT real, it's made up.

 

[NerdyCavegirl]

I will say this once more in response to your 'science' questions. Whatever you want to happen in your story is TRUE if you provide reasonable believable justification for it. It's called suspension of disbelief. Fiction is NOT real, it's made up.

And as I'm aware of this, I must reiterate that I just prefer my reasonable justification to have its roots in real-world physics. So far, we still haven't figured out how all the universe works, thus I prefer to use what concepts are understood as a base and start the journey there. There seems to be an assumption that because I adamantly request science-based answers to questions like this, I limit myself to every known rule that physics follows. No, I simply want a firm foundation of complex scientific principles and process upon which I weave together strange fantastical conflicts, filling in blanks in current knowledge, whether it be a magic system or new creatures, between pillars of known info.

 

[NerdyCavegirl]

In short, the information I request, whether proven or theoretical, is my foundation, not my roof. There are few possibilities in the cosmos I truly doubt, and this is why I seek whatever information is already known or hypothesized on a topic before I decide the best reasoning for any fantastic elements, to pay tribute to the miraculous and horrendous possibilities just within the universe we live in.

 

[ThinkerX]

This is getting 'out there' and beyond my competence level. Still, from a couple years of being a minor member of a site dedicated to space flight...

A 'natural wormhole' if such exists, might be considered roughly equivalent to a 'rip in space time.' However, the energies involved are so intense you couldn't travel through it. Actually, you wouldn't even want to be in the same solar system as something like this.

A 'artificial wormhole' (as per the movie 'Interstellar') is another matter, though physics issues abound.

One weird astrophysical thing that is 'real' and might be pertinent is this:

early on in the formation of the universe, it expanded faster than C (speed of light). I have come across references that space-time itself is still expanding faster than light, though this is difficult to determine, because we are within space-time. This is part of the premise behind the 'warp drive' - though the person proposing it says it cannot work because it requires 'negative mass.' Some of the threads I have been following elsewhere claim it might be possible to use a sort of 'proxy' for negative mass, though the existence and physics behind said proxy's are also debatable.

 

[K.S. Crooks]

Don't forget the "time" aspect. Time travel may take place, the people encountering the rip may experience faster or slower passing of time. It could also lead to an alternate universe. Perhaps the opposite end of every rip in space-time or every black hole is the big bang of another universe. Read the works of Stephen Hawking and then do what you think works best for your story.