I've always been interested in science fiction and the many technologies it portrays. One of these is the ability to travel between the stars, via a warp drive or wormholes. It can be helpful to think of space as a two dimensional sheet (which it is not, space is three-dimensional so any curvature would be in the 4th dimension, which people can't visualize) with a small amount of curvature (many physicist believe that space is curved). This would suggest that the universe curves back in on itself and is closed. If you were to punch a hole through space, which is what a wormhole would be and is what some think black holes are, you could travel to an opposite side of the universe without having to travel the long, curved way around the outside. This could make travel to distant stars instantaneous. However, the problem is that we don't know how to generate black holes at will, and even if we could, we don't how to keep them stable enough to travel through. Physicists have suggested that if you aim enough high-powered laser beams at a single point in space, you could create a black hole. You might be able to keep this black hole stable by using negative energy, a form of energy that has a repulsive gravitational effect that would counteract the intense gravitational pull of a black hole. Considering all the advances that have been made in science, I would say that travel through space via wormholes wouldn't be impossible 300-400 years from now.
- Andrew
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