Wormholes

A **wormhole** is a structure that bends space-time to connect two separate places in space-time. They are commonly described or depicted as "tunnels," however, this is an oversimplification. In actuality, there is no space inside of a wormhole, entering and leaving a wormhole is instantaneous. The only limit being how fast the object can move through it. Wormholes are often used as a form of faster-than-light travel and are common used when other methods are impractical.

## **Technology**

### **Wormhole Gates**

A **Wormhole Gate** is a large (usually elliptical) mega-structure capable of linking to another gate through an artificial wormhole. These gates are commonplace in the universe, with the average star able to accommodate several (although the smallest red dwarfs do not have the energy output to create a wormhole in a reasonable time-frame). These structures typically orbit the home star or accompany the planet they are meant to lead to. When a wormhole gate is first constructed, it is linked to another wormhole gate. These two gates cannot be separated without entirely replacing the structure. These two gates will always lead to each other. In most star systems, there exist seven wormhole gates to the nearest star systems, and two to the nearest major planets.

As mentioned above, two wormhole gates need to be created for each destination one would like to go to. Travelling through half-a-dozen wormholes to get to a location takes a lot of time, especially considering how long the queues are to get into the busier wormholes. What's more is that they are very unstable, requiring the operators to "cool" them down every so often, which basically means shut down. This is because particles at the edges of the gate can absorb its energy, gradually becoming faster and faster until the whole generator is undergoing a sustained fission event (as many of the particles accelerated are neutrons). "Meltdowns" caused by insufficient shutdown time have been disasters rivaled by few single events in history.

#### **Wormhole Networks**

Most major civilizations have created **Wormhole Networks** linking together major planets in their galaxy. These networks end up taking up the largest portion of the energy budget of most civilizations that construct them. Along with the wormholes to the nearest systems, an average system has at least two wormholes to the nearest major systems.

### **Wormhole Pits**

A **Wormhole Pit** is a (usually) one way, traversable wormhole created from a blackhole with no linear momentum, angular moment, and net electrical charge. Pits are traversed very, very, quickly, as the same matter which falls below the blackhole immediately comes out of the white hole, ejected at lightspeed. This method is completely fatal to any subluminal vessel or object not protected by a warp bubble. It is currently unknown where the exit of a Pit leads, possibly somewhere dimensionally or temporally disconnected from the normal universe.

It is theoretically possible to enter the white hole and exit the black hole with superluminal speeds. This form of travel remains uncommon in favor of the much more practical Wormhole Gate.

These wormholes are called pits because they both act as pits where something is thrown in and not recovered, and because they have a singularity at their core similar to the pit of a cherry.

### Wormhole Bridges

A **Wormhole Bridge** is a wormhole, containing a throat of non zero length. More commonly found in nature, or by less technologically capable species, Wormhole bridges are slightly more complicated than Wormhole Gates or Pits. Imagine an apple with it's peel representing 3-D space. When a hole from one end of the apple to the next is dug this would create a wormhole bridge.

**The Membrane** of a wormhole is the closest it has to a border. It is not like a barrier, but rather an infinite repetition of the space of a wormhole, If you were inside of a wormhole looking to your left you would see the back of your head and the right side of your body. The distance between you and yourself would be the diameter of the throat at that point. If you could look past yourself, you would see another of you an equal distance from the first and yes, an additional apparition of you would be looking at the back of your head.

**Wormhole Intersects** is where things get really complicated, it is hypothetically possible for the mouth of a wormhole to open up inside the throat of another. It is also possible for a mouth to lead to more than one exit but only by using a Gate type wormhole. In this set up the destination is contingent on the origin as consequence of an orientable manifold.

### **Wormhole Communication**

**Wormhole Communication** is the most advanced way of interstellar communication yet achieved by simply sending signals through a tiny wormhole. It usually consists of creating a tiny artificial wormhole, beaming a signal through it with a small satellite dish fixed on the starship to the destination. If it's close enough (in the same system), then the communication is near instantaneous. Sending a message directly across the Silky Way would take around one year however. While the message travelling through the wormhole itself is instantaneous, it would take a year to generate a wormhole that could travel such a long distance.

### **Wormhole Drive**

A **Wormhole Drive** is an experimental type of faster-than-light technology, utilizing highly advanced wormhole generators to generate a tiny artificial wormhole, allowing for near instantaneous travel between the range of one hundred to one thousand light years. Usually a wormhole drive can make a total of ten jumps before needing to be refueled by a ridiculous quantity. Wormhole drives are usually very large, unable to be fitted on small or sometimes even medium sized ships.

## **Simple Concept**

For a simplified notion of a wormhole, space can be visualized as a two-dimensional surface. In this case, a wormhole would appear as a hole in that surface, lead into a 3D tube (the inside surface of a cylinder), then re-emerge at another location on the 2D surface with a hole similar to the entrance. An actual wormhole would be analogous to this, but with the spatial dimensions raised by one.

Another way to imagine wormholes is to take a sheet of paper and draw two somewhat distant points on one side of the paper. The sheet of paper represents a plane in the spacetime continuum, and the two points represent a distance to be traveled, but theoretically a wormhole could connect these two points by folding that plane (⁠*i.e.* the paper) so the points are touching. In this way it would be much easier to traverse the distance since the two points are now touching.