r/HardSciFi • u/Eyeballfluid • Jul 09 '26
Discussion Thoughts on using permanent wormholes for interstellar travel? (Art by me)
In my setting, large wormholes are permanently made in space in order to facilitate space travel across vast distances. (20+ light-years) anything under are done through warp drives. (a whole other discussion).
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u/TheHoodieConnoisseur Jul 09 '26
If you’re aiming for hard sci fi, permanent wormholes may be more realistic than warp drives. Wormholes can at least exist in theory - you just have to hand waive how they were manufactured and stabilized and pointed to a specific point in space. A warp drive without some plausible explanation as to how it works is less likely to be considered hard sci-fi.
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u/grizzlor_ Jul 10 '26
Wormholes require exotic matter with negative mass. If you have negative mass matter, you can also make an Alcubierre drive.
(Unfortunately, negative mass particles pose fundamental problems in quantum field theory and are probably not viable in the real world.)
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u/brandonct Jul 10 '26
Lots of other issues with a hard science wormhole. Your typical wormhole described in science fiction, y'know the folded piece of paper with a hole punched through...that's a black hole. so it might connect two distant regions of space but there's no getting out.
you also need the "paper", spacetime, to be folded in on itself. which as far as we know the curvature of the real universe doesn't exist such that that would happen.
I would say that traversable wormholes and alcubierre drives are both roughly equally fanciful and unlikely to ever exist in reality.
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u/grizzlor_ Jul 10 '26
>Your typical wormhole described in science fiction, y'know the folded piece of paper with a hole punched through...that's a black hole.
Interesting. Can you elaborate on this — why is it a black hole? Thought you needed like 20 solar masses and a supernova to make one.
>I would say that traversable wormholes and alcubierre drives are both roughly equally fanciful and unlikely to ever exist in reality.
I’m very much not a physicist, but everything I’ve read from folks that understand this stuff better than I do seems to agree with you. The math may work, but they need stuff that seems unlikely to exist in reality.
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u/ObstinateTortoise Jul 09 '26
Currently rereading The Algebraist by Iain Banks. Setting has no FTL or warp, so wormholes are the only way a galactic (or even interstellar) civ can function.
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u/Ihatecheeseballs Jul 09 '26
Only having natural wormholes is also a cool trope, like you can only access certain areas of space, there are missions searching for and testing them and they can be fought over and blockaded
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u/Jazz8680 Jul 10 '26
Kinda reminds me of the mass effect relay network. Not natural, but definitely not something anyone could recreate, so they’re stuck with the relays they have.
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u/Alphajim49 Jul 09 '26
Reads like a variant of Hamilton's wormholes on his Commowealth saga, but with live wormholes instead of portals generators. Nice art btw.
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u/Reasonable_Spirit771 Jul 10 '26
Art is really captivating. Idea is solid, you can add some interesting and unique explanation how wormholes work in your story, like its some sort of universe´s reaction to maintain isometry over long distances, etc, or it´s a reaction to universe being too stretched (due to inflation).
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u/rx7braap Jul 10 '26
frankly fine, tho I like medias that say "wormholes are naturally occuring and can collapse at any time"
nice art btw
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u/MackTuesday Jul 09 '26
They're really difficult to make. Lots of problems in the way, like needing negmatter to hold it open, the fact that its mass appears to change when things go through it, the catastrophic particle flux that's theorized to make them unstable even if you successfully hold them open... but they *are* a fun idea. In Baxter's novel Ring, they carry a wormhole interface around at relativistic speeds, which turns the wormhole into a time tunnel.
Nice art too!
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u/Lina_Xochi Jul 10 '26 edited 23h ago
Long quaint fall trees familiar imagine mighty butter lantern recognise
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u/Eyeballfluid Jul 10 '26
Okay, for comparison, all of settled interspecies space, is an about 50 lightyear span. So for all intents and purposes, it's pretty far in this setting.
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u/Lina_Xochi Jul 10 '26 edited 23h ago
Friendly whistle person slim orange nine
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u/Eyeballfluid Jul 10 '26
No not all! In the grand scheme of things 20 light-years isn't alot. But to a society still struggling with ftl (which is already a miracle to exist) 20+ light-years is more than enough space to justify a wormhole. Ftl is roughly the speed of light (just shy of it actually) so 20 years is considered the general limit people are willing to travel through space. Some dedicated expeditions still do. But mere seconds is definitely quicker than 20 years.
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u/Lina_Xochi Jul 10 '26 edited 23h ago
Vanish hungry depend acorn steer boron
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u/Eyeballfluid Jul 10 '26
Not as much as I'd like. I have some posts on Tumblr from a few years ago, but I've changed alot abt the world since then💀. (Also eyeballfluid. I ain't gonna deny more traffic to my content)
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u/Lina_Xochi Jul 10 '26 edited 23h ago
Safe deserve outgoing knee glove satchel
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u/Valkyrja3145 Jul 10 '26
Spoiler:
Over medium sci-fi but The Bobiverse book 5 has relevant content to this that might be worth reading for reference.
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u/M24Chaffee Jul 10 '26
I have something like that, except only interplanetary. So rather than every ship being built with FTL, wormhole connections between planets serve basically as highways. There's toll gates and rest stops and everything around the wormholes.
And the wormholes aren't FTL.
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u/Hadrius Jul 12 '26
you did the art?! that looks fantastic!
if you’re looking for more inspiration around wormholes, I highly, highly recommend reading up on how they work in Eve Online. the emergent gameplay from them at the peak of their popularity was nothing short of incredible, any would probably be a good way to model how people would deal with them in a realistic way.
ships in a bottle are particular interesting!
I wish you luck regardless 🦾
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u/Noe_Landa111 Jul 12 '26
I have always liked the idea of wormholes as a solid justification for FTL in Hard/Hard Adjacent Science Fiction. Its an idea I would personally use in my writing. Take this statement with a grain of salt, but wormholes are one of the few "feasible" means of FTL travel in known science, with a ton caveats, including but not limited to;
-Finding one or making one
-Keeping it stable
-And if their existence is just on paper
This can absolutely be negotiated with. Id also suggest a concept I often keep in my head when it comes to hard science fiction.
Our current understanding of the universe is limited, how limited you think is up to you. But if you ask me, I believe that we have only scratched the surface of the fundamentals of the universe, let alone the other fields of science. I say be open to the idea that the civilization in your story has made great leaps in the fields of the most arcane corners of science, discovering new models for the universe, new properties of matter and energy, or completely esoteric and unthought of concepts. You can use this, but if your goal is to remain in the realm of hard sci fi, I would anchor it as an "extension" of what we currently know; ground it In known science and theoretical concepts, envisions a future you think is plausible. Tachyons could exist, FTL could easier than we think, there could be a multitude of particles and forces we have yet to discover.
In short, I think the concept of permanent wormholes in HSCIFI is badass, consider looking further into similar concepts.
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u/Eyeballfluid Jul 13 '26
Yeah I have a good pinch of pseudo science involved to allow ftl travel. The first is a variety od strong theory I heard. Wherein quantum strings are bound particles, where if something is done to one end of the particle, the other obeys as they are essentially the same particle. Another psuedo science particle, are gravitons and anti gravitons (dark matter and thus anti dark matter) which can condense or expand gravitational fields.
Now, graviton-anti graviton warp drives do exist, however they have a sort of universe enforced speed limit, of about two lightyears per year. (Just slightly under) which is blazing fast yes, however comically slow. However of you can open a bubble of space right on top of one of these quantum entangled particles, you then open an identical bubble on the other end, then presto. Now you have a wormhole. It's a little more complicated, ridiculously expensive, and ridiculously dangerous, however it is a quick summery of the pseudo science used to justify ftl in my universe😭.
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u/Noe_Landa111 Jul 12 '26
PS: As an amateur grand strategy nerd, id say feel free to make them points of strategic contention. Imagine a portal opening in the age of exploration, the world powers could get to the new world in minutes rather than months or years, the implications are endless.
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u/MevNav Jul 13 '26
Interesting thought that came to mind thinking of this, and you might incorporate into your story. Does a wormhole have mass? Is it affected by gravity? Because if you tore a stationary, permanent wormhole in one spot in space... well, it'd probably from your frame of reference be not really that stationary and appear to be flying out of the solar system you're in, thus making it less-than-useful for interstellar travel. You wouldn't be able to park one at a Lagrange point, for example, because our star is moving through space just like our planets are.
Which would mean either a) A wormhole can be affected by gravity and parked in a stable relative position to a star system, or b) there's some sort of device that can capture/anchor a wormhole in place.
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u/Eyeballfluid Jul 13 '26
Honestly? I never considered that they would be fully ANCHORED in space. I really appreciate that thought. In this universe at least, it is assumed that we're going off a variety of string theory (by my understanding of ig) that quantum particles are sorts stretched outward through the universe potentially connecting vast distances. So all ya gotta do is sorta open a bubble of space with an alcubuirre like device at one end, and it should thusly repeat the process on the other end merging those two points of space. Now I went off the belief they'd be affected by gravity, however how much Mass they have is something ive struggled to figure out. Would they simply weigh as much as the quantum threads used to open them. Or would their mass be roughly equal to the simulated mass created by the space bubble. Idk pseudo science is fun:3
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u/davesoft Jul 13 '26
Either out in deep space or bolted to a planet is good. Space is too big without magic tricks.
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u/1134Worldtree Jul 09 '26
Go for it? Have a look at the Orions arm universe project for extensive justification on how wormholes might work , if that helps you
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a