BadNick

ring,
That looks like it will be a fun ride. But if you really want to get anywhere other than around the block in the immediate neighborhood, you'll either have to move a LOT LOT faster than the speed of light, or find some way of getting from "here" to "there" without travelling thru the space between here and there. So I've been working on this multi-inter-universal travel widget and I'm getting closer to a working solution each day. I figure if I get half way to the solution each day, then I only have half the way to go the next day.

Since we were just talking about bugs, I'm happy to report that it has to do with worms ...actually wormholes. Some mundane points about this concept might interest even the casual space traveller: empty space, when examined with quantum theory on a sufficiently small distance scale, is not empty at all. Even at nuclear dimensions (10-13 cm) empty space is filled with particle-antiparticle pairs that are continually flashing into a brief existence, bankrolled on the credit of borrowed mass-energy, only to wink out of existence again as the law of conservation of energy reasserts itself. Didn't Al Gore invent the law of conservation of energy?...Wink Wink. If the length-scale is contracted to a size appropriate to quantum gravity (10-33 cm) this quantum fireworks intensifies to a "quantum foam" of violent fluctuations in the topology and geometry of space itself. Some of you may be familiar with the foam pit at your local club, but this foam is different. Quantum black holes form and vanish in a span of time of 10-23 seconds; highly curved (doesn't that sound sexy?) and convoluted regions of space in any physically allowed configuration have a similarly brief existence. In this environment Morris, Thorne, and Yurtsever speculate, it may be possible for a civilization considerably more advanced than ours, but not necassarily any smarter than most of the members of this "The Longest Thread", by "pulling a wormhole out of the quantum foam and enlarging it to classical size" to create a connection between two nearby points in space. This would use the well-known quantum mechanical process called "tunneling", a jump from one allowed energy state to another across a barrier of intermediate states that are forbidden by energy conservation.

Have a nice trip.