Quote from: cantharidin on April 15, 2013, 03:52 pmFirstly, I do not think that the human species has the longevity to get to a technological point that we could do it, even if it was possible. The universe is a harsh and unforgiving place, and there are too many events, small insignificant perturbations for the universe's point of view, that would make human existence impossible.Secondly, even if the concept of bending space around to touch itself somewhere else in three dimensional physical space was real (and it very well might not be) the energy required and the physics fo the wormhole would be far outside the abilities of humans to muster. A wormhole connecting different physical locations in 3D space would, IMO, be something on the order of a black hole (perhaps black hole singularities pop out somewhere else in 3D space - who knows?). Warping of space in such a way would also, necessarily, warp time. It's well appreciated by the general public that a person falling into a black hole would get shredded (spaghettified), but what is less appreciated is that, from the perpective of the person going into th eblack hole, this would NEVER actually happen since time slows down correspondingly so you'd never make it.This brings up the Thirdly. When we read science fiction and think about wormholes, we are thinking about the universe, space, and time as we perceive it. I believe that the nature of reality is far different from our perception. We barely understand quantum mechanics and what it says about reality (understanding is different from modeling and using it's rules to predict small scale behavior). We really don't have a true understanding of what space and time really are and what exists when and where. Being able to create a wormhole to use like a train track implies a much too simplistic view of time, location, and reality.Really good answer. I love this stuff, so don't think I'm so much contradicting you as much as being a nerd and just chatting, but you have it reversed actually: as you approach the black hole, time for the person approaching it will appear to flow 100% as normal. It's to everyone else that the person will appear to be moving slowly. So for the person "falling into" the black hole, they'd basically just get ripped apart and burned alive from the intense energy. I mean they'd basically just get blown up without any time distortion from their view at all.Everyone else would see them slow down until they were almost not moving at all, just kind of hovering there right outside the black hole -- the closer they got, the slower they'd be going. It's a bizarrely paradoxical thing that I don't claim to fully understand, but it's well tested and documented and predictable and all of that -- it's the same exact thing that happens as you get closer to the speed of light. In fact we've tested it with atomic clocks, one on the ground and one in an airplane that's moving relative to the rotation of the earth: even that small relative movement is enough to distort time that way.Also, we actually know how to do this -- we just can't do it. I'm sorry, I should say we know how it would be done, rather. Basically it is a black hole, and theoretically yes, it would work. The problem is that the wormhole would require 100% symmetry to stay stable and not collapse. But as you approach one side of it, you throw off the symmetry and it's no longer 100% the same on "both sides," as it were -- causing it to collapse. We don't know how to solve that, and it may not even be possible.Another problem with it is that just for an opening large enough for a person to go through without being crushed almost instantly by the intense gravitation, the black hole would have to be about a mile in diameter (that's from memory, I may be off on the number). That's a fucking huge black hole that would require enormous energy to generate. It's absurdly impractical by today's standards.So yes... theoretically it is possible. What would actually happen is pure theory, that it would actually work is pure theory, but according to all the physics that we know (and that *I* know we know at least), it could be done. Someday. Just not in our lifetime :(