• Question: how long do you think it is until we start using einstein rosen bridges to traverse across space and time?

    Asked by wrigb012 to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 18 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 18 Nov 2013:

      Can we please focus on getting a decent high speed railway network first? 🙂
      With respect to Einstein Rosen bridges: we haven’t even seen wormholes yet. Maybe they don’t even exist in practice? Even if we find that they exist, there would be incredible technical challenges ahead before they could be used for travel – if at all. So, I’d say this will take a few more generations at least, assuming ongoing funding of fundamental research. Of course it might never happen at all. On the other hand, we might figure it out surprisingly quickly.
      Long story short: I have absolutely no idea. 🙂

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      a great question for me…
      You probably know that Einstein-Rosen bridges are something to do with black holes. Actually you have to make a pair of them which is theoretically possible (not physically likely though). Then you take them far apart. The insides of the black holes are joined by an ER bridge. Now if you jump into black hole 1 you can travel through the bridge and appear *inside* black hole 2 and meet your friend who jumped into 2. But unfortunately you can’t get out of black hole 2. So ER bridges can help 2 people who are light years apart meet but then they are stuck inside one of the black holes. Then in finite time they will get crushed at the singularity. Not good. So ER bridges are very interesting for theorists but not useful for traversing space and time.

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      Have you been watching Thor, by any chance? 🙂

      Unfortunately we have no idea how to create an einstein-rosen bridge. The energy requirements alone are ridiculous and beyond anything we’re remotely capable of. Hopefully in the far, distant future it will be possible, but there’s no way to predict where humanity will be in thousands of years.

      We would also have to stick a black hole in our solar system…not sure if that’s a particularly wise thing to do.

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