EARTH 12000: EXPLORING SPACE, TIME, AND PARALLEL UNIVERSES

By Dick Pelletier

     This concludes the ten-part Earth series which began three years ago with “Earth 2030” and ends today with a glance at what life may be like ten millennia from now.

     Of course, nobody can predict exactly how the future will unfold in 10,000 years, but by tracking technology advances expected in the coming centuries, we see changes that will transform humanity into super-intelligent beings focused on developing space, exploring universes, and traveling through time.

     Imagine if you could peek in on the dinosaurs first-hand, enjoy an exotic vacation thousands of light years from Earth, or jump into a parallel universe where another you is living a far more exciting life than yours – and you could stay there if you like.

     For years, scientists around the world have bandied about the revolutionary idea that future humans could zip across the universe using wormholes as high-speed portals enabling faster-than-light travel to explore space, enter other universes, and witness the past and future.

     Wormholes enable travel between its two openings. One wormhole end stays home while the other is carted away at sub-light velocities to the destination, connecting two locations through a tunnel in warped space-time. A person enters the wormhole, and depending on the connection, exits to a remote destination in space, another time in the past or future, or a parallel universe.

     Consensus among most scientists has been that wormholes are so destructive; people would be torn to subatomic bits if they tried such a thing. However, a new paper by University of Utah physicist Lior Burko now raises the possibility that wormholes may not annihilate all matter, and the potential for hyperspace travel could one day be realized.

     “One possibility is that wormholes may allow us to travel to very remote places in the universe, or to another universe entirely,” said Burko. “It depends on the topology of the universe, which today, we do not know very well… I’m not arguing it’s a practical thing to do, but in thousands of years from now it may become simpler.”

     In Burko’s scheme, wormholes are theoretical constructs equivalent to tunnels, or shortcuts, between distant points of the universe, different places in time, or even parallel universes. This idea isn’t new. Wormholes were popularized by Caltech physicist Kip Thorne in the 1980s and were the interstellar vehicle of choice in the Jody Foster movie, Contact.

     Princeton physicist Richard Gott, author of Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe, said, “I characterize it like a speed bump. You hit it, and you come out in a region of time travel, another universe, or somewhere a great distance away. These are interesting possibilities.”

     Though construction of wormholes is beyond present day abilities, advances in today’s machine intelligence, combined with new nanomaterials promise to soon provide humanity with superior nanoelectronic brains where intelligence is governed by physics, not biology. Sometime between the years 3000 and 12000, many futurists believe that civilization could be capable of harnessing wormholes.

     Could a forward vision like this really happen? Given the rise of religious fundamentalism and a growing anti-science movement, there could be rough sledding ahead, but positive-thinkers believe that with determination and good fortune, this “magical future” can become reality.

This article appeared in various print publications and on-line blogs. Comments always welcome.