Voyages through Wormholes and Hyperspace Admittedly, interstellar travelling is not easy, especially not, if it depends on such simple technologies as that of us humans. As inefficient solid-fuel rockets and slow engines are applied, space travelers can get no further than to Mars. And whether the first step onto a planet in an alien solar system will be done by a human himself is out of the question. Decades of research and development have been necessary until space flight has arrived at its present state. Perhaps somebody in a future generation will hit on the fact that there's not that much about space travel technologies. The difficulty itself lies in the nearly invincible distances in space - not in driving techniques. The solution for a problem which rather mathematicians than engineers should be designated to solve sounds easier than it is. Instead of the motto "upgrade engines" it should be "reduce distances". The range between two far-distant destinations should be shortened so that e.g. the way from here to Alpha Centauri (with 4.3 light-years the nearest sun to our solar system) becomes only as great as some hundred meters. The principle is quite simple: The best solution would be to apply a wormhole, an imaginary short cut between two distant points in the universe. Each wormhole has two entrances which are situated in different places, and are connected by a tunnel in hyperspace. The hyperspace is an area which allows us to make the curvature of space-time in a certain region visible. Actually, this is done by an embedding diagram which portrays the universe in a more idealistic way; instead of showing three dimensions it shows only two. Moreover, it describes the curvature of space-time which is caused by matter. Hyperspace can be best compared with a rubber mat on which lie bowls of different weight. A bulge on the mat is the deeper the heavier a bowl is. If you roll a marble over the surface, its course is distracted by the bulges. It's the same that happens to beams of light when moving through space. A ray's course is curved by the gravitation of the stars which they pass by. Back to the wormholes: Singularities can happen to stretch out in hyperspace to connect to each other for a brief time. Then, a wormhole The secret in the creation of such a wormhole lies in quantum foam, a property of space in tiny scales. The amount detail that we can recognize depends on the amount of magnification. The magnification which is necessary to analyse the quantum foam cannot be attained by any microscope. It's simply impossible to make such small structures visible, because you would - after having zoomed to the size of a nucleus (10^-13 cm) - have to magnify another 20 times by the factor of 10 until you reach the quantum foam level. The hypothetical microscope we are using, though, is able to attain this resolution. The structure is based on vacuum fluctuations in the gravitational field. Similar to the already known electro-magnetic fluctuations and to those of a space-time singularity inside a black hole the space seethes in the range of 10^-33 cm, the so-called Planck-Wheeler-length. Here the space-time's form is determined by randomness, connections between single areas of space keep forming and decomposing. Exactly these connections must be used. If we had any mechanism with which we could expand the tunnels in space-time to our proportions to be traversed by space-ships, this would be a perfect short cut to abridge cosmic distances. By now, the laws of quantum gravitation - the area of modern physics that treats of such phenomena - aren't known well enough to make predictions about whether this will ever be really possible. But if we succeed in using the curvature of space-time on a hyper-microscopic level, and in travelling through wormholes, still there is an important element missed. Since a wormhole is exposed to a continuous bombardment by radiation in space, it would tie up as early as it is crossed by a particle. The gravitation of a particle entering the hole attracts - even if only slightly - its walls so it collapses at once. Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist and author, deals among other things with the problem of time-travelling and wormholes. He has found out that - if one could shield a wormhole from any harmful influence from outside - the hole had to be interspersed with one special kind of matter not to let it collapse again. This type of matter had to possess characteristics that effects a pressure on the wormhole's walls instead of attracting them. That means the gravitational force which is radiated by this matter should be negative and matter should have a negative mass. Although some scientists have already succeeded in creating tiny amounts of anti-matter (electrically conversely charged protons and electrons), there is no recipe for the creation of matter with a negative mass. Which possibility for the stabilization of wormholes is left, then? In any case there is none that is easy to understand. The opportunity for the creation of a stable wormhole is only offered if one manages to curve space-time in every reference system. Now there seems to be nobody who really knows how to do so.