How can interstellar travel through wormholes be dangerous for unborn children?

[Erebus]

Wormholes allow for interstate travel and commerce to occur between solar systems. These structures connect two disparate points in space-time, creating a tunnel linking both points to each other. This gives ships the ability to travel trillions of miles within a matter of minutes at most. However, while space travel happens in a blink of an eye within base reality, the passage of time through a wormhole doesn't change. Ships can spend hundreds or even thousands of years in the transition phase. This limits utilization of use for humans, as dozens of generations will live and die before even making it to their destination. To bypass this, humans are put into a capsule and placed in a form of suspended animation, which stops all biological functions so that physiological capabilities are preserved. This allows for the pausing of life processes without terminating life itself. essentially freezing the person in time. In this ageless state, all measurable metabolic processes stop, preventing any development or changes from occurring. The capsule preserves the minimum conditions for the human body to survive while keeping it safe for the entire trip. Important organs, such as the brain and heart, suffer no cell deterioration, necrosis, or molecular death caused by oxygen deprivation or temperature. When the ship reaches its final destination and environmental conditions return to being hospitable, the human will be revived and return to its original state of life as it was prior to the process.

One question mark is the condition of pregnant mothers during interstellar travel. The capsule and the conditions it sets must be adjusted to take two lives into consideration, as well as the trimester that the child is in. As the fetus is still in the process of developing, the conditions necessary to be adjusted in order to keep it alive would be minimal. When the ship arrives and the mother is revived, the fetus can continue on the developing process as normal as if no interruption had occurred. This was the idea as it was intended, although reality hadn't played out as planned. As it turns out, 90% of children die through this method, either through transport or during the revival process itself. Because of this, the government has issued a galaxy wide travel advisory, warning similar to a smoking and drinking notice to expecting mothers. Some local solar system governments have explicitly banned travel for these individuals.

How can this form of travel be made dangerous for the life of the unborn child but safe for others?

 

[Finchbearer]

Well, I hope I’m not pointing out the obvious by suggesting that an unborn foetus is just more delicate, more susceptible to injury, including the pregnant female / person than others who are not pregnant.

Maybe I should elaborate a little bit, the immune system acts differently when a female is pregnant, while pregnancy is not an illness, it can create a susceptibility for a lowered immune system.

 

[pmmg]

Well...suspending the mothers life processes, would have to translate to the fetus. It just simply doesn't, or the interruption is at a phase of development that cannot suffer pausing.

I would suspect, they just would not let pregnant women engage in the travel. And it would just be by accident that it happened.

Perhaps the process involves removing the fetus, putting it in stasis, and then reimplanting. A dangerous process on its own.

 

[Queshire]

Ok, but why do you want this element in the first place? What does it add to the story?

 

[Erebus]

Ok, but why do you want this element in the first place? What does it add to the story?

One, just because it's a world mechanic. Two, the government has an alternative reason. the tunnel between wormholes is a dangerous place hostile to life. There are things living within it that are not understood. On rare occasions, indicators detect three life forms during the revival process, indicating that the child has brought something back with it.

 

[Queshire]

Sooooo... you've already got your answer then. It's dangerous because there's things in there that prey on unborn children.

 

[pmmg]

One, just because it's a world mechanic. Two, the government has an alternative reason. the tunnel between wormholes is a dangerous place hostile to life. There are things living within it that are not understood. On rare occasions, indicators detect three life forms during the revival process, indicating that the child has brought something back with it.

This logic does not work.

If it is common for the baby to die, and the people become alarmed when there are three life forms, they would get a lot of false negatives from the baby being dead, but two life-forms still being detected. Maybe they should just use an ultrasound.

Given the risk, why allow pregnant women to travel through the wormhole?

 

[FifthView]

First, everything you wrote is fascinating.

I'm not sure you need an explanation. Some handwavium is okay, and especially if you want a horror element.

If you absolutely need the exact mechanics, perhaps because you want the issue solved at some point—so it's a mystery tale, and everything has to come clear by the end—I don't think you need medical doctors and biologists in our world to be able to answer it. The tech for suspending these people for hundreds or thousands of years is already far beyond what anyone could understand scientifically. So the reason it doesn't work for fetuses is also beyond our understanding.

Queshire gives a plausible answer. The predator or stowaway injures the unborn child, fatally, 90% of the time. But why? Perhaps the thing cannot integrate with a totally frozen/suspended life form, so it returns the fetus to a regular state briefly, and this causes the baby's metabolism and the mother's metabolism to be at such odds, the baby dies. Maybe something like that? I'd then need to decide if this return to a regular state requires messing with the machinery holding mother and baby in suspended animation, or if it's a more direct sort of thing. The stowaway might be able to create a temporal "balloon" or "cocoon" around the fetus momentarily, allowing entry, at which point the cocoon disappears and both are returned to the suspended animation state.

Or maybe the problem occurs during the return stage at the end of their trip. The machinery is configured to revive two known beings—with their specific biology—to a normal state, but because there's an interloper, the process fails for the baby.

 

[ThinkerX]

I might be misreading, but the explanation seems a bit backward.

Big flaw with 'instant elsewhere' star drives is that they violate causality - for the effect to be instantaneous in both the starship and the rest of the universe means that the starship would be travelling backward in time. What is usually proposed for such is that for those aboard the ship, the duration of travel is very short - a few moments, perhaps. However, time flows normally everywhere else, and the relativistic speed limit is absolute.

Hence, if the wormhole connects two points 100 light years apart, then only a few seconds might pass for those aboard the ship traversing the wormhole. However, when the ship exits the wormhole, 100 years will have passed in normal space.

(I got around this by invoking Lovecraftian abominations)