It’s possible that an extremely advanced alien civilization has created a transportation network of wormholes around the universe — and we might even be able to spot them.
While it’s certainly a far fetched theory, according to a
new piece by BBC Science Focus, it has some scientists intrigued. Take Nagoya
University astrophysicist Fumio Abe, who told the publication that we may have
even already captured evidence of such a network in existing observations — but
lost them in the sea of data, leading to the intriguing prospect that
reanalyzing old observations could lead to a breakthrough in SETI.
“If the wormholes have throat radii between 100 and ten
million kilometers, are bound to our Galaxy, and are as common as ordinary
stars, detection might be achieved by reanalyzing past data,” Abe told Science
Focus.
It’s an alluring theory, in other words, that suggests one
more pathway to figure out once and for all whether humans are alone in the
universe.
In simple terms, wormholes are theoretical tunnels with two
ends at separate points in time and space. While they don’t violate Einstein’s
general theory of relativity, we still have no idea if they could actually
exist, let alone if a sufficiently advanced civilization would be capable of
producing them
For a wormhole to exist, though, it would take astronomical
amounts of energy.
“Intrinsically unstable, a wormhole would need ‘stuff’ with
repulsive gravity to hold open each mouth, and the energy equivalent to that emitted
by an appreciable fraction of the stars in a galaxy,” reads Science Focus‘
story. The idea would be that “if ETs have created a network of wormholes, it
might be detectable by gravitational microlensing.”
That technique has been used in the past to detect thousands
of distant exoplanets and stars by detecting how they bend light. Whether it
could be used to detect wormholes, to be clear, is an open question.
Fortunately, spotting wormholes isn’t our only shot at
detecting life elsewhere in the universe. Science Focus also pointed to the
search for theoretical megastructures that harness the energy of a star by
fully enclosing it, or atmospheric chemicals linked to human pollution, or
extremely thin reflective spacecraft called light sails, any of which could
theoretically lead us to discover an extraterrestrial civilization.
The concept of wormholes is a tantalizing prospect,
especially considering the fact that they could give an alien civilization — or
even us — the ability to travel over vast stretches of space and time.
But for now, unfortunately, they’re not much more than a fun
thought experiment.