Quantum Probability Drive with wormhole

[Tom Kalbfus]

Here an idea for an alternative to the Jump Drive You start with two starships, lets say they are scout/couriers for the sake of argument, the two starships are docked stern to stern via the quantum probability drive. The fuel is consumed, and one starship jumps to a parallel universe, the other one remains behind and both are connected by a wormhole portal that is 3 meters wide at the rear of the engine room or both starship, One can step through the port hole from one starship to the next and then back again. The starship that jumped is in a parallel Universe, that universe is not very parallel, all it shares in common with the departed Universe is it shares the same laws of physics and constants. The parallel Universe evolved differently from the point of the big bang. There are different stars in the parallel universe and even different galaxies, chances are the region the other starship jumped to isn't even within a galaxy, the universe also maybe either younger or older, larger or smaller than the original universe. If the departed starship is between galaxies, fuel may be pumped through the wormhole from a convenient source, such as a gas giant and the departed starship can accelerate indefinitely within the parallel universe until it reaches a galaxy and finds star systems to explore.

What do you think of this idea?

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Magic tech for sure. Because of the parallel universe part.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Magic tech for sure. Because of the parallel universe part.

The initial jump takes about 20% of the ship's displacement in fuel which gets consumed to open up a random wormhole to send the ship through, then the wormhole opening contracts to 3 meters and is kept open by the output of the ship's power plant. The main cost is the two starships, each one costs MCr27.5 A pair of ships holds open the wormhole to one separate universe, the only way into that particular Universe is through that wormhole, on the positive sign, using Einsteinian Time Dilation and an endless supply of fuel sent through the wormhole, this ship has an essentially unlimited range, even if it appears in the "middle of nowhere", the ship has an effectively unlimited range within that second Universe, and with Time dilation it can reach just about any part of it within a human life time. Usually the destination is the nearest galaxy. Millions of years can elapse in the second Universe, but the time in the original universe remains in syncs through the wormhole with the dilated time within the second starship. the first starship can continuously skim the atmosphere of a gas giant to feed the second starship as it accelerates through the second Universe.

Using the second ship's sensor suit, Earth like planets are looked for as the second ship passes through a galaxy, when a likely target is found, the second starship slows down. The target candidate is a primordial Earth-like planet. The planet is seeded with life, and then the ship departs on a million-year circuit through the second Universe and then returns to that same planet one million years later, when supposedly the terraforming effort is complete. The second Scout ship then lands on the planet's surface to assess the success or failure of the terraforming effort, if successful, then colonists are sent through from Earth. One little detail, 50% of all the Universes opened to are antimatter universes, not very useful places to colonize, some universe are too young for colonization, while others are too old, those have to be weeded out. A young hot antimatter universe makes an excellent fuel tank though, the hot plasma of the antimatter Universe can be controlled by magnetic fields and channeled to a matter/antimatter power plant to be reacted with matter for the production of energy.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I'm thinking that this could be based in the Traveller Orbital setting A moon of Saturn Iapetus is said to have ruins of secret alien wormhole technology, a group of scientists based on Iapetus have reverse-engineered the Alien technology to create their own wormholes, the problem is, they can't create them to specific locations with our own universe, but they can open up wormholes to parallel Universes. To give you a brief summary of Traveller Orbital, it is set in the year 2100 AD, there is no artificial gravity fields, no maneuver drives, no Jump drives, the tech level is set at 9 with the exception being tech level 11 (B) for computer technology. Space ships are either interplanetary vessels or interface vessels (landers, shuttles, rockets) to get craft off the surface of large bodies such as Earth, the Moon and Mars. Travel through the Solar System depending on destination takes from weeks to months. There were a group of aliens called the Cydonians that visited the Solar System, and were know for building the "face" and Pyramids on Mar, they also built a secret installation on Iapetus for their wormhole experiments, disaster struck and the installation was abandoned and the Cydonians left the Solar System. But some Earth scientists then discovered this and from this they built their own wormhole generating apparatus, this then is what became the quantum probability drive. This discover of course alters the Orbital setting in significant ways, so it is set in the mid 22nd century, the political situation is much the same, there are still no artificial gravity fields, but the Quantum Probability Drive sort of takes the place of a Jump Drive and facilitates something similar to a maneuver drive. The way it does this goes like this:

Build two scout ships link them together tail to tail, then activate the QPD sending one of the ships into an alternate Universe with the same laws as this one, but otherwise quite different. The ship in the alternate universe is linked to the ship in this one through a 3 meter wide wormhole. Fuel is pumped from the scout ship skimming Saturn's atmosphere to the ship in the alternate universe which then uses Saturn's gases as both reaction mass and fuel, the scout ship in the other universe then finds another gas giant in that Universe and starts skimming that for fuel, using that fuel, the scout in Saturn's atmosphere then lifts off and reaches orbit spouting a trail of hot gasses from the gas giant in the other Universe. This scout ship that then accelerate up to 2 gs indefinitely to reach any destination in the Solar System and beyond using the same travel formulas as used by the standard maneuver drive in Traveller. A ship by this means could travel to Alpha Centauri in 5 years, however most planets orbiting Earth's neighboring starts aren't habitable to humans, however in the alternate universes, Einstein's relativity can be used to "speed up the clock" so to speak in those other Universes, facilitating efforts to terraform other planets, mostly involved with seeding primorial planets with Earth life to change that planet's atmosphere over time, then by traveling in a circular path near the speed of light time gets sped up in that parallel universe to the point where the atmosphere in that seeded planet is oxygenated to the point where it can support human life, and then colonists are sent through to settle the newly terraformed planet. That is the plan of course, the adventure comes with PCs trying to solve problems they encounter along the way. The cost of each wormhole created is the cost of two scout ships.

How does this sound as a setting?

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Just a clarification: Only one wormhole leads to each parallel universe, each new wormhole created leads to an entirely different parallel universe, never the same one! This makes time travel in any direction other than forward in the parallel universe impossible, because you need both ends or a wormhole in the same Universe to make a wormhole time machine, so with this rule, you can't have this sort of time travel, makes wormholes more usable in a role playing game. Probably the resulting changes in this Post Orbital setting would include a mass migration off-Earth through wormholes onto terraformed planets in parallel universes. The population of Earth would go down significantly. Planets are expensive to terraform and doing the necessary relativistic time dilation in the parallel universes takes time, and their are a number of hazards along the way. For one the ship accelerating in the parallel universe might hit an object in space and be destroyed while going near the speed of light. The other end of the spaceship in Our solar system would probably explode from the backwash through the wormhole as a result, and with the wormhole apparatus destroyed by this explosion, the wormhole would then collapse down to the original quantum foam it spouted from, probably with a big explosion in its wake. But those efforts that succeeded would lead to planets Earth people and spacers alike could migrate to. Of course after millions of years of terraforming in the parallel universes, some creatures may evolve that weren't intended, this could lead to other interesting adventuring challenges.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Another idea I had was prison planets, this sort of technology would be ideal for creating a prison planet for sending undesirables to. As terraforming any sort of planet is expensive, there would probably be only one prison planet in this campaign. They want some place to send all their violent criminals from which they cannot escape, because they are in a different Universe, they could collapse the wormhole connecting the Solar System to it, but then after they did that they would have no place to send additional prisoners to other than prisons, and if they wanted another prison planet, they would have to "create" a fresh one from scratch in yet another parallel universe.

I had an idea for the Cydonians as well, they conducted similar experiments with terraforming, they partially terraformed Mars for a time, but then it reverted back to its natural state after they left. Orbiting Alpha Centauri is a terraforming experiment which they completed, a lot of Earth creatures that became extinct in the Traveller Orbital setting on Earth are found on the planet Aurora orbiting Alpha Centauri A, this is the only planet near Earth in Earth's own Universe that is habitable to humans, and a Generation ship/sleeper ship was sent there with a number of colonists, before the breakthrough in the Quantum Probability drive. There is some interest in sending animal and plant species found on Aurora back to Earth. The new QPD based maneuver drives allow for faster transits between the stars in a matter of just years instead of decades, basically by accelerating to the midpoint and then decelerating the rest of the way at 1g. This was made possible by dropping the requirement that a ship carry its own fuel, which a QPD wormhole allows for now.

This will serve as a postcard view of the planet from the surface.

Ignore the Social Date for now the UWP is more like A867540-9 the settlers have just arrived, they carry all sorts or weapons and equipment, they are a representative democracy, and they haven't quite worked out legal code for the planet's surface. so law level is 0, a ship takes about 5-6 years to reach Earth and a transmitted message 4.4 years, so they are quite isolated out here. The QPD drive has created a lot of destinations that are easier to get to that Aurora, so there are very few additional colonists coming to this planet.

 

[Rick]

Hold off on that idea for a little while. There is a project starting up at CERN to identify mini black holes as a key to multiverse/string theory. Whilst I won't be holding my breath to see if it provides a key to string theory, it may offer more information on the multiverse theory and extra dimensions.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Hold off on that idea for a little while. There is a project starting up at CERN to identify mini black holes as a key to multiverse/string theory. Whilst I won't be holding my breath to see if it provides a key to string theory, it may offer more information on the multiverse theory and extra dimensions.

You ever here of superposition? or the Everett multiverse theory on quantum uncertainty? There is the famous slit experiment where a single photon can either go through one slit or another, and it manages to go through both an interfere with itself? the idea is that the Universe splits at that moment in one universe the photon follows one path and in the other it follows another path, before the two universes are completely seperated the single photon follows two paths and interfere's with itself. Also if you flip a coin, the Universe splits and in one Universe it ends up heads and in the other the result is tails.

Have you seen the show Sliders? In that show a bunch of adventurers travel sideways in time through wormholes, each parallel universe is only slightly different, say historical events went differently from our history. After a while after watching a number of episodes of this show, all the episodes look the same, there are multiple versions of San Francisco or Los Angeles one where the British defeated the American rebels in 1776, another where the Russians won the Cold War, one where women are the dominant gender, etc etc etc, after a while it becomes predictable.

There is another way to do parallel universes, instead of having thousands of different parallel Earths in parallel universes, why not have parallel universes with no Earth at all. The initial split of the Universe occurred at the moment of the big bang, there may be an infinite number or parallel universes, some with slightly different versions of you and me, but if you had a random wormhole that opened up to a parallel universe, the chance of encountering a parallel version of you or me on a parallel Earth is just about nil. Too many random "die roles" required to create another Earth by chance. Also travelling sideways in time is undefined, unlike traveling forwards or backwards in it. When you travel backwards in time, you have a chance of interfering in history and creating rules for paradoxes, and wormholes where both ends are in the same Universe can be made into time machines, thus you need rules for paradoxes. I don't want to do time travel and deal with paradoxes and people trying to preserve history. Also traveling faster than the speed of light creates a time machine. To solve the problem I place planets to be explored in parallel universes.

the wormholes are still time machines, but since both ends are in different universes, time travel which affects the past is not possible. If you go to the past in a Universe that is not your own, you can't change your own history or interfere with your own birth. Forward time travel is a useful tool for creating Earthlike worlds by terraforming. If you want to oxygenate an atmosphere and you can wait millions of years to do it, it is very easy, just add plants that split carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, wait a million years and the air is breathable when you return. You have a planet that you can explore and live on and have something that evolved that you can discover.

 

[Rick]

If you want a way of quantifying the multiverse in a way that makes sense from a roleplaying perspective - try the 'Luther Arkwright' graphic novel series. On one parallel they identify the different parallel universes with a numerical code, using their own parallel as a baseline, 'zero-zero'. So, for example, 00-00-00-05 might only differ from your own parallel slightly (e.g: Napoleon forming a world-spanning French Empire after conquering Russia in 1812), whereas 00-00-01-00 might differ significantly - neanderthals might be the dominant human form, for example and 00-01-00-00 might not have an earth present at all. 99-99-99-99 would be a complete opposite to your baseline, where the physical laws of the baseline parallel might not even work and the universe is markedly different in all respects).
The point being, you will get many parallel worlds where the 'divergence' from our own is comparatively recent and will differ from ours in many respects, but the further back in time the divergence happened, the more differences there will be.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

If you want a way of quantifying the multiverse in a way that makes sense from a roleplaying perspective - try the 'Luther Arkwright' graphic novel series. On one parallel they identify the different parallel universes with a numerical code, using their own parallel as a baseline, 'zero-zero'. So, for example, 00-00-00-05 might only differ from your own parallel slightly (e.g: Napoleon forming a world-spanning French Empire after conquering Russia in 1812), whereas 00-00-01-00 might differ significantly - neanderthals might be the dominant human form, for example and 00-01-00-00 might not have an earth present at all. 99-99-99-99 would be a complete opposite to your baseline, where the physical laws of the baseline parallel might not even work and the universe is markedly different in all respects).
The point being, you will get many parallel worlds where the 'divergence' from our own is comparatively recent and will differ from ours in many respects, but the further back in time the divergence happened, the more differences there will be.

I did a bit of that a while back, thing is, I'd have to write a whole timeline from the divergence point to the present for each universe, and there is no concise way to represent each Universe unlike the 6 attributes for the UWP. I am a fan of Sliders, but that is not what I had in mind here, basically its another means of interstellar travel, but one that completely ignores the local stars around Sol. I've read about wormholes how if you created one assuming the ends start out close together, you could accelerate one end to near the speed of light, say to Alpha Centauri, lets say from the end's point of view it takes a year of accelerating and decelerating to arrive at Alpha Centauri, whereas in the outside universe the end is seen to take a bit over 4.4 years to get there. (Through hard acceleration!) The people back on Earth however only have to wait one year, they can then step through this wormhole to arrive at Alpha Centauri 3.4 years in the future, but they also can step back through the wormhole and end up a moment just after they left, in this case the time travel doesn't matter because the distance in light years is greater than the distance in years. But from Alpha Centauri A you could create another such wormhole and accelerate and decelerate it back towards Earth and it arrives 3.4 years later as seen from the outside, but only 1 year after that as seen through the second wormhole. One can then step through the first wormhole from Earth to Alpha Centauri and arrive 3.4 years in the future, then one can walk to the second wormhole opening at Alpha Centauri and step through that and end up back on Earth another 3.4 years in the future, for a total of 6.8 years in the future on Earth, and by retracing ones steps through the two wormholes one can walk 6.8 years back in time just moments after one left. Now you have a two-way time machine with these two wormholed. One can go back and forth and change history endlessly and either it causes paradoxes or the universes split off from one another both universes being mostly identical except for the tiny changes wrought by the time traveller's meddling with history and of course the butterfly effect that follows. If you go onb making these timelines, you end up with a lot of universes that end up looking much the same with an endless number of parallel Earths, and you can have trade and commerce between them through these wormholes, and each Earth ends up pretty much like any other, so as before you had 8 billion people on Earth, with these two wormholes, you now have 16 billion people on two parallel Earths, and each individual or almost each will have his near identical counterpart in the other Earth, though one being 6.8 years older than the first. This doesn't to me look like a very interesting cosmos. With parallel universe, no chance of a time paradox, there is no reason for each Universe not to interfere with any other, unlike a time travel campaign with paradoxes, where there is an effort to preserve history.

So to start all over with wormholes and make a consistent universe with a bit of strangeness and newness to it, instead of a series of almost identical carbon copies of Earth, I change my first assumption about wormholes, namely that you can create a wormhole with both ends close together in the same Universe, what if you can't?

What if you can create a wormhole, but the other end ends up somewhere else, you can't control where or when that other wormhole opening ends up. Sensors and probes are sent through the wormhole, and most often the other end is in intergalactic space. The Hubble constant is measured (the rate at which the Universe expands) and in each case it is a little or perhaps a lot different, some Universes are big and old, while other Universes are smaller and young, they all seem to have originated in a Big Bang, but each Big Bang seems to have occured in a different moment in the past. The game mechanic is roll 3d6-4 to determine how many billions of years old the Universe is, this will produce a range of from 0 to 20 billion years. Our Universe is about 13 billion years old. Astrogation checks do no good, it is hard to tell whether it is the same Universe at different times or different Universes and different Big Bangs altogether. People tend to shrug it off and say, "Hey, there are stars and planets here we can colonize!" The same effect I mentioned with the first wormhole operates here, except both wormhole ends effectively start out in different Universe, they are not casually connected. The fact that the other end of the wormhole appears in intergalactic space is of no consequence, galaxies can be seen, a telescopic observation determines which Galaxy is the nearest one, and the starship at the other end carrying the wormhole end starts accelerating there, no need to worry about fuel, as it can be pumped through the wormhole as needed.

There is this website which calculates travel times:
http://www.convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.html
Let say you had to travel 2,000,000 light years to reach the nearest galaxy to start exploring, and lets say you had a ship which could accelerate at 6 gs, this calculator says it would take 5.2751665975024125 years of ship time to reach that Galaxy. As I said before there is no artificial gravity in this setting, but then there is no need for anyone to be on that ship at the other end, it can be piloted remotely through the wormhole, the pilot can remain on Earth if he likes, fuel would be fed through the wormhole to the ship at the other end, and it constantly accelerates at 60 meters per second squared.

according to the rules of the calculator:
1. The star ship accelerates continuously from the origin to the midpoint of the mission.

2. At the midpoint, the ship turns its thrusters to face the destination.

3. The ship decelerates continuously from the midpoint to the destination.

So the people back on Earth wait 5.275 years for the other end of the starship to arrive at the Galaxy they are intersted in, it does not matter how much time elapses in that other Universe due to time dialation, as there is nobody they care about observing that trip. So they wait 5.275 years look for a near Earth like planet, one that is almost like Earth, and with all these stars to observe, you can get a planet that comes pretty close, they want a primitive atmosphere like the Earth had about 4 billion years ago, and then they introduce Earth life to it rather that wait for evolution to create its own complex life, this life is largely single-celled plants algae optimized for photosythesis, and then the ship takes off and leaves, they go on a 1,000,000 light year journey in a near circle, while keeping track of that planet they left behind. This second Journey takes another 5.051281901423193 years from their perspective, a little more than 10.32 years is required for the entire project to come to fruition back on Earth, and then comes landing day, the ship lands on an Earthlike planet with a breathable atmosphere, the life is still rather primitive, but now the atmosphere will support higher life forms from Earth, so those are sent through the wormhole, trees and grasses are spread to every continent, wild life is distributed, and then the ship takes off again on a shorter journey, this time they travel a circle that is 100,000 light years in circumference. This takes another 4.307553805162063 years their time or a total of 14.63 years their time to accomplish, finally the ship lands one final time, and colonists step through to a planet with virgin forests and lots of wild life, or that is the hope anyway. Little is known about this Universe they travelled to, no one know who or what else lives there. Plenty of opportunities for adventure. Obviously this setting is tailored to the Scout Career, much of it has to do with exploration. There is no true predictable faster than light drive, if you want to visit a neighboring star to this world, you have to go by slower than light travel.

I hope I've made this setting clear to you.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Now the question you may ask is who does the colonizing? Is it a government, a corporation or an individual, and what are the dangers?
What if somebody leaves a self-sustaining colony of humans on a planet terraformed as I described and then pilots the wormhole ship another 1,000,000 years in the future, there are two possibilities for the humans left behind, they may have perished and became locally extinct or they may have evolved into something else more advanced perhaps, smarter more intelligent, and they may invade Earth through the wormhole ship once it lands back on the planet! Can you see the danger here? One million years is enough time for further evolution to occur, humans have evolved from apes in that amount of time, now telling what modern homo sapiens might evolve into after another million years after being left on that planet, or what sort of tech level might exist. I think that prospect would scare alot of people back on Earth if someone tries it. At the same time, someone may attempt to try it, what if they go a shorter distance in the future after leaving a colony of humans on the planet? What if the humans advance their tech in the meantime, it might mean cheap an easy research. Lets say the ship travels a 1000 light year circle, this would take 2.820198993569284 more years, the population of the planet at this time could easily be in the billions, if it started out as a colony of only 100,000, and the people who sponsored it could benefit by the high tech level that society developed, on the other hand that society might just decide to use that technology to conquer Earth, after 1000 years, those descendents would likely no longer be loyal to their original sponsors, they might be friendly or they might not be, but the important thing is, those Earthlings would be helpless if any of them stepped back through that wormhole with all their advanced tech, a situation faced by the Indians when they met the Spanish Conquistadors! There would have to be some regulation for this type of terraforming, probably the quantum probability drive would have to be kept a secret to prevent its abuse.
Can you think of any other perils with this?

 

[Rick]

The people on the earth end of the wormhole wouldn't experience the time dilation effect. So they would still be waiting thousands or millions of years for it to unfold.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

The people on the earth end of the wormhole wouldn't experience the time dilation effect. So they would still be waiting thousands or millions of years for it to unfold.

That's not what I heard, the clock ticks at both ends of the wormhole at the same rate no matter what.

From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole
Time travel[edit]
Main article: Time travel
The theory of general relativity predicts that if traversable wormholes exist, they could allow time travel.[3] This would be accomplished by accelerating one end of the wormhole to a high velocity relative to the other, and then sometime later bringing it back; relativistic time dilation would result in the accelerated wormhole mouth aging less than the stationary one as seen by an external observer, similar to what is seen in the twin paradox. However, time connects differently through the wormhole than outside it, so that synchronized clocks at each mouth will remain synchronized to someone traveling through the wormhole itself, no matter how the mouths move around.[23] This means that anything which entered the accelerated wormhole mouth would exit the stationary one at a point in time prior to its entry.

For example, consider two clocks at both mouths both showing the date as 2000. After being taken on a trip at relativistic velocities, the accelerated mouth is brought back to the same region as the stationary mouth with the accelerated mouth's clock reading 2004 while the stationary mouth's clock read 2012. A traveler who entered the accelerated mouth at this moment would exit the stationary mouth when its clock also read 2004, in the same region but now eight years in the past. Such a configuration of wormholes would allow for a particle's world line to form a closed loop in spacetime, known as a closed timelike curve. An object traveling through a wormhole could carry energy or charge from one time to another, but this would not violate conservation of energy or charge in each time, because the energy/charge of the wormhole mouth itself would change to compensate for the object that fell into it or emerged from it.[24][25]

It is thought that it may not be possible to convert a wormhole into a time machine in this manner; the predictions are made in the context of general relativity, but general relativity does not include quantum effects. Analyses using the semiclassical approach to incorporating quantum effects into general relativity have sometimes indicated that a feedback loop of virtual particles would circulate through the wormhole and pile up on themselves, driving the energy density in the region very high and possibly destroying it before any information could be passed through it, in keeping with the chronology protection conjecture. The debate on this matter is described by Kip S. Thorne in the book Black Holes and Time Warps, and a more technical discussion can be found in The quantum physics of chronology protection by Matt Visser.[26] There is also the Roman ring, which is a configuration of more than one wormhole. This ring seems to allow a closed time loop with stable wormholes when analyzed using semiclassical gravity, although without a full theory of quantum gravity it is uncertain whether the semiclassical approach is reliable in this case.

Inter-universe travel[edit]
A possible resolution to the paradoxes resulting from wormhole-enabled time travel rests on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In 1991 David Deutsch showed that quantum theory is fully consistent (in the sense that the so-called density matrix can be made free of discontinuities) in spacetimes with closed timelike curves.[27] However, later it was shown that such model of closed timelike curve can have internal inconsistencies as it will lead to strange phenomena like distinguishing non orthogonal quantum states and distinguishing proper and improper mixture.[28][29] Accordingly, the destructive positive feedback loop of virtual particles circulating through a wormhole time machine, a result indicated by semi-classical calculations, is averted. A particle returning from the future does not return to its universe of origination but to a parallel universe. This suggests that a wormhole time machine with an exceedingly short time jump is a theoretical bridge between contemporaneous parallel universes.[30] Because a wormhole time-machine introduces a type of nonlinearity into quantum theory, this sort of communication between parallel universes is consistent with Joseph Polchinski’s discovery of an "Everett phone" in Steven Weinberg’s formulation of nonlinear quantum mechanics.[31] Such a possibility is depicted in the science-fiction 2014 movie Interstellar (film).

 

[Rick]

Had to edit this. Just remembered - the experiment was done with a fast train and 2 clocks - 1 on the train and 1 stationary - the one on the train was found to have gone a fraction slower than the stationary one, so time is not absolute. If someone stepped into the moving wormhole when their clock showed 2004, they would reappear at the stationary one in 2012. Once the moving wormhole arrived, although its' onboard clock showed 2004, objectively the universe would be in 2012. The presence of the wormhole would not change the passage of time in the universe.

One way around this might be to play around with the multiverse and string theory. If time is only one of dozens of dimensions that make up the physical framework of a universe, then theoretically, the way the dimensions work might differ in a parallel universe, including time. If you connect to a parallel universe where time is either non-linear or linear but operates at a different rate (or even in reverse), you could use it as a kind of time travel.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Had to edit this. Just remembered - the experiment was done with a fast train and 2 clocks - 1 on the train and 1 stationary - the one on the train was found to have gone a fraction slower than the stationary one, so time is not absolute. If someone stepped into the moving wormhole when their clock showed 2004, they would reappear at the stationary one in 2012. Once the moving wormhole arrived, although its' onboard clock showed 2004, objectively the universe would be in 2012. The presence of the wormhole would not change the passage of time in the universe.

One way around this might be to play around with the multiverse and string theory. If time is only one of dozens of dimensions that make up the physical framework of a universe, then theoretically, the way the dimensions work might differ in a parallel universe, including time. If you connect to a parallel universe where time is either non-linear or linear but operates at a different rate (or even in reverse), you could use it as a kind of time travel.

Actually being able to "fast-forward" a Universe through relativity helps tremendously in terraforming a lot of planets within a human lifetime, this is a very useful trait, it explains why their are a lot of Earthlike planets with breathable atmosphere and compatible food supplies for humans.
The Aurora colony around Alpha Centauri fits into this as well. Earth and Luna launched a Sleeper/Generation ship on a 73 year voyage to Alpha Centauri in the year 2100 AD, I use the Traveller Orbital setting as the base. The colonists are all in low berths, this mission is a bit of a survival mission, because of the Cold War between Earth and Luna, the ship's computer is firewalled from communications from Earth, in case some hostile faction were to send a computer virus to sabotage the mission, there is a secondary archival computer though, it records transmissions received from Earth, At around the year 2135 it records the discovery of the Quantum Probability Drive, a number of wormholes open up, by 2150 the first extra-universe colonies are set up and there is mass migration from Earth to these created terraformed Earthlike planets. By around 2170 the "Great Silence" occurs transmissions from Earth cease as do transmissions from the rest of the Solar System. What happened was a virus infected the Internet and from they caused all sorts of technology to cease functioning. Since the colony ship Argos is firewalled, it was not infected by the virus. The hard-wired Archive Computer recorded this virus, but there was nothing the virus could infect, and the computer software and operating system was 70 years out of date anyway. The colonists are basically on their own, however they do find this orbiting their new home planet Aurora:

Interstellar vessel of Island One size, ion-driven. Central arc substitutes for sunlight. Reaction of matter and antimatter gives power (twenty-first and -second centuries).
This starship contains enough antimatter for two round trips to earth, it was sent by the Earth Union after the discovery of the Quantum Probability Drive, it would take 41.53 years to return to Earth, the Earth Union sent it in case any of the colonists wanted to return to Earth, the antimatter was provided by a wormhole to an antimatter universe, thus making antimatter cheap.