How To Time Travel | National Geographic

in a universe so vast is there any hope of us traveling fast enough so that we could visit the far-off realms of space will we ever be able to plant a flag in the most distant quadrants of the cosmos we are not going to achieve interstellar flight in our lifetime we may be as far from reaching other stars as Leonardo da Vinci was from realizing an airplane he had the idea but it took another 400 years before that began flight even so it hasn't stopped scientists from imagining the theoretical possibilities of interstellar travel one sense possibility is a cosmic freak show a much theorized portal through space called a wormhole so wormhole is basically a thin tube of space that connects to very very distant parts of space so it's almost like a tunnel it's a little part of space you go in there and you pop out somewhere else in the universe on tunnel through space shortcut through the billions of light-years separating the farthest ends of the universe it begs the question of how anything could bore a hole through space the wormhole is basically like a tunnel through space itself that can connect one region to another region potentially very far away so to illustrate that we're taking space and imagining it as this two-dimensional sheet of paper so we have a wormhole mouth that you can go in and then the other end is a place you can go out so you imagine a tunnel that goes into there and comes out of there and you might say well it would take me longer to get from one place to another if I went through that tunnel than if I just took the direct route through ordinary space but the point is that Einstein tells us that space and time or curved they're flexible so we can imagine picking up this piece of paper and curling these two regions so that they're close to each other then you go into that end of the wormhole you come outside the other end and there's a shortcut in between them in which the distance is not that much so the wormhole provides a way that you can travel what appears to be a very long distance in a very short period of time and it's for that reason that wormholes have found a special place in science fiction if you want to write a science fiction novel you might want to be able to get across the galaxy very quickly and you don't want to be limited by the speed of light so a wormhole can be a shortcut it can be a way to get around all the space that you have to travel through if you believe that the speed of light really is a speed limit you can't go faster than the speed of light the wormhole provides you away maybe to still go slower than the speed of light but get to where you want to go much faster because the distance is much shorter it's really just a shortcut through space itself a wormhole might also empty into another time that's because wormholes are portals through the fabric of space and time while they could theoretically link different locations in space they could also theoretically link up different locations in time because space and time are mixed up together you could actually not only end up in a different part of space by going through the wormhole but you could also end up in the past you could end up in a different part of time you could go into your own past then come visit yourself before you entered the beginning of the wormhole so you could have a wormhole it goes from your living room to your dining room they might be five years apart so you enter one this year you come back five years ago and if you take the paper with you you've got some good chances of doing well in the stock exchange

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 3,105,229

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Keywords: Science, Technology;, Space;, sun;, fastest;, known, universe;, explosion;, light;, space;, time;, wormhole, national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, documentary

Id: SafwXdP7ylc

Length: 4min 9sec (249 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 17 2009