Twelve seconds to the moon

I know this will be two posts on astrophysics in a row, but after Everything Is Muted's post here, I can't leave space alone.  Plus, as she's the only one who reads my blog, I figure there won't be any complaints.  I decided I can't respond to her post directly, as I essentially agree with her basic idea and thus feel I couldn't add anything worthwhile to the dialogue.  Therefore, I've decided to continue the spirit of the conversation by pursuing the idea with which I ended my last post.

DISCLAIMER: At this point we are moving into the realm of complete hypothesis, speculation, and perhaps even sheer fantasy.  We ended with the problems of traveling near the speed of light, which is desirable for obvious reasons (read: Wookiee co-pilots).  To restate simply, traveling very close to the speed of light causes time to slow for the traveler while it runs normally for those of us left on Earth.  Thus, even traveling to the center of our Milky Way Galaxy in a mere eight years ship time would mean 30,000 years on Earth.

The word "galaxy" derives from the Greek galaxias, literally meaning "Milky Way."

The way we're going to overcome this problem is by using the fourth dimension.  I know, I know, but I'm actually not making this up.  You may have heard talk of the fourth dimension as being one of time.  That's not what we're talking about here.  We're talking about an actual fourth physical dimension.  So how does this all work, exactly?  Well, as much as I wish I could just point to it, we humans are unfortunately trapped in our three-dimensional world.

To try to understand it, then, let's take a step back.  Let's borrow Neil deGrasse Tyson's example of an ant walking along the edge of an opened newspaper.  Pretend the ant exists only in two dimensions, that is, length and width.  Obviously, the ant has height, as well as the ever so slim height of the newspaper, but let's just imagine.  If we, looking down on this flat world, wanted to help the ant travel from one edge of the paper to the other without having to walk all the way across, we could do so by introducing a third dimension.  That is, we could simply fold the pages up together, allowing the ant to move to the other page before setting them back down.  The ant has seemingly jumped from one side of the newspaper to the other in an exceedingly short period of time.  Most importantly, the ant, only able to perceive the two dimensions that define his existence, doesn't realize he's just traveled through the third dimension.

Clear as mud, right?  Let's just assume you know what I'm talking about and forge ahead, back to our three-dimensional world.  We know, thanks to Edwin "That Telescope Guy" Hubble, that the universe is expanding at a certain rate.  Think of this expanding universe as an open newspaper.  As it expands, it also curves.  This curvature of spacetime acts as the fold of the newspaper as it doubles back on itself.  This fold allows the possibility of a wormhole.  A wormhole is essentially a shortcut linking the two folds of space time, allowing you to travel from one side to the other faster than the speed of light, just like the ant was able to quickly "jump" from one side of the newspaper to the other.

This wormhole is visualized in three dimensions, but you get the idea.

STINGING REJOINDER: Hold on, there, space boy.  Special relativity says that nothing but light can travel at the speed of light.  Well, yes.  Going through the wormhole near the speed of light lets us reach a distant point in the universe faster than the time it would have taken light to reach it going around the fold.  Picture going through the tunnel versus following the red line in the diagram above.  Any light traveling through the wormhole with us still reaches the other side faster than we ever will.  Thus, special relativity is satisfied, and it doesn't take us tens or hundreds of thousands of Earth years to catch happy hour at the Mos Eisley Cantina (play it again, boys!).

Unfortunately, while relativistic physics allows for the existence of wormholes, there's no actual... er... evidence that they do.  That's not particularly unsurprising, as people far smarter than me are fairly certain that any possible wormholes would be extremely unstable and collapse in a matter of seconds.  So basically, utilizing this method would require us to figure out how to create and manipulate stable wormholes through the fourth dimension.  Simple, right?

MISGUIDED OPTIMISM: But hey, anything's possible.

From the fourth dimensional wormhole of Ivan Zissou

dictated but not read

cth