We May Already Have Evidence Of Wormhole Built By Alien Civilization, Says Astrophysicist

It's plausible that an incredibly intelligent extraterrestrial civilization has built a network of wormholes across the cosmos, and humans may be able to find them.

While it's a far-fetched theory, it's piqued the interest of some scientists, according to a new BBC Science Focus story. Take, for example, Nagoya University astrophysicist Fumio Abe, who told the media outlet that we may have already captured evidence of such a network in existing observations — but lost them in the sea of data — raising the intriguing prospect that reanalyzing old observational data might lead to a SETI breakthrough.

“If the wormholes have throat radii between 100 and ten million kilometres, are bound to our Galaxy, and are as common as ordinary stars, detection might be achieved by reanalyzing past data,” Abe told Science Focus.

In other words, it's an enticing notion that proposes yet another approach to determining once and for all whether humans are alone in the cosmos.

Wormholes are theoretical tubes having two ends at different places in time and space. While they do not contradict Einstein's general theory of relativity, we have no clue whether they might exist, much alone if a sufficiently evolved society could produce them.

A wormhole, on the other hand, would need enormous quantities of energy to exist.

“Intrinsically unstable, a wormhole would need ‘stuff’ with repulsive gravity to hold open each mouth, and the energy equivalent to that emitted by an appreciable fraction of the stars in a galaxy,” reads Science Focus‘ storey. The idea would be that “if ETs have created a network of wormholes, it might be detectable by gravitational microlensing.”

This method has already been used to discover hundreds of distant exoplanets and stars by determining how they bend light. To be clear, whether it might be utilized to identify wormholes is an open subject.

Fortunately, detecting wormholes isn't our sole chance of finding life elsewhere in the cosmos. Science Focus also mentioned the search for theoretical megastructures that harness a star's energy by completely enclosing it, atmospheric chemicals linked to human pollution, and extremely thin reflective spacecraft known as light sails, all of which could theoretically lead us to the discovery of an extraterrestrial civilization.

Wormholes are an enticing possibility, particularly given that they may provide an extraterrestrial civilization — or perhaps ourselves — with the power to travel over enormous stretches of space and time.

Reference(s): Science Focus