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Imagine trying to explore every single nook and cranny of our planet on foot. You would require several lifetimes to complete that adventure. Now imagine trying to do the same with the universe.

Such a journey would be a gazillion times more difficult even if you built the fastest spaceship ever known to mankind. The fact of the matter is, the universe is so unimaginably vast that nothing, not even light itself could explore all of it.

Another fact is that the laws of physics do not allow anything to travel faster than light which travels at the speed of 299,792,458 m/s, which is in itself, unimaginably fast but compared to the distances involved in cosmos, it is painfully slow. So, even if you somehow designed a spaceship that could travel at the speed of light, you would take 8 years just to make a round trip of the nearest star to the sun, Alpha Centauri.

So, you might ask yourself, “Does that mean we will never be able to explore the cosmos? Not even a tiny portion of it?” For an explorative species like ours, that would be a very big bummer. But wait, physics may have the answer after all.

Wormholes: The Shortcuts of the Universe

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You may have heard about wormholes or seen one in sci-fi movies before, but they are not just limited to fiction. Even though we have yet to observe one, wormholes are backed by math, which means there is a big possibility that they exist.

If you think that isn’t enough evidence, remember that we observed gravitational waves only recently while Einstein had predicted them a century ago based on the math.

So how will wormholes enable us to roam the universe to our heart’s content? Well, wormholes act as a direct shortcut between any two points of the universe no matter how apart these are. I won’t get into the technicality of how it works.

So, in theory, you could enter a wormhole just above the Earth, and come out of the other end which could be millions of light years away, all in an instant! Though it is not teleportation, it would sure feel like it!

That would allow us to visit distant star systems in our spaceships without having to actually travel long distances at all. Just imagine what that will do to our knowledge of the universe. It’ll definitely expand like wildfire with many space explorers all around the galaxy and perhaps even other galaxies!

That would surely make for a Star Trek kind of a world where space explorer would be a legit job title! I know I would want to be one. Let’s just hope that the scientists trying to figure out how to make one have a miracle breakthrough real soon.

Warp Drives

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Warp drives are another way that could theoretically allow for faster than light travel and no there are no shortcuts involved in this. The spaceship would actually have to travel the long distances.

So, how would it travel at faster than light speeds without breaking any laws of physics, you ask? Well, the way a warp drive works is, it contracts the space in front of the ship and expands the space behind it.

Therefore, the ship moves forward as though it was riding the space instead of travelling through it. No laws of physics are broken, because the ship wouldn’t be doing the moving but space would be moving the ship at faster than light speeds and yes, the light speed limit doesn’t apply to space.

Interestingly, a lot of research is being done in this field. Even NASA has been looking into it for quite a while now. In fact they even came up with a concept of a warp drive spaceship which can be seen above.

Just as the wormholes, Einstein’s equations within the general theory of relativity, could allow for such a warp drive. We only need to have several breakthroughs in physics before any such drive may be possible.

Despite these two being just theories for now, it is heartening to know that scientists think that they are quite possible in the future. Some even say that it is not a matter of if but when such technologies will be in our hands and instead of the world, the whole universe could be our oyster!