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My guess is a wormhole would need constant Negative Energy to stop it from collapsing? Anyone done any work on that?

Even if just a small tiny wormhole could be created it would still allow instant communication, wouldn't it? So there wouldn't be a time lag between colonies.

Your wormhole work is interesting and - in another forum, where the reaction was unreasonable scepticism - you've asked what the implications of wormholes might be. I'd like to put a few thoughts out there.

Firstly, the impact of wormholes will depend on the necessary technology and power-levels. If they're easy to generate and maintain, then the impact will be incredible - I'll elaborate in a moment. If they require lots of energy and are difficult to keep open, then their uses will be much more limited until the energy problem is solved.

Secondly, if wormholes are restricted to being made and connected locally, then moved around at sub-light, they will be useful short-cuts, but the wave-front of human endeavour will expand at sub-light. If wormholes can be projected, or moved via warp-metrics, at FTL speeds then that situation changes totally.

But let's look at the possible uses, starting with direct travel.

To ship a wormhole, assuming it's low-mass, we can attach a rocket to its cage and fire it off - just about any rocket will do, then we can pipe propellant to it via the wormhole. To push a wormhole/rocket combination weighing 1 ton to near lightspeed would take ~ 100,000 tons of propellant - assuming we're using a steam rocket with 3 km/s exhaust velocity. That water is a lake a hectare in area and ten metres deep. A cubic kilometre of water lets us move ~ 10,000 tons, or 10,000 wormholes. That's enough wormholes for roughly every star within ~ 94 light-years, which would be reached in ~ 127 years at the latest. In about ~ 110,000 years every star in the Galaxy could be linked up via wormhole. Using merely Earth's water - which we wouldn't - the job would be done with just ~ 0.74% of the total.

Assuming a 10 gee rocket we could send a wormhole to Pluto in ~ 5 days. If wormhole maintenance costs are low enough, then we could profitably ship frozen nitrogen and methane from its surface. We could mine hydrogen clathrate from Sedna or some other Inner Oort Cloud object. Or suspend a wormhole mouth via a balloon and funnel hydrogen/helium direct from the Jovians, petrochemicals from Titan's lakes, raw sunlight from Mercury, or - assuming advanced reflective materials - pipe intense sunlight straight from the photosphere of the Sun.

Assuming a wormhole stable against the conditions we could send them into the core of the Sun to cause mixing between the Core and the outer layers, thus increasing the Sun's remaining lifespan 10-fold. The process would take ~ millions of years because the inner regions are very dense, but we're talking billions of years anyway.

The transport implications are complex because we have so few parameters on what wormholes will be possible - there's questions of conservation of momentum and energy when transferring between different points on the Earth or in-space: Will masses moved between planets keep the momentum they had relative to their original position? Does an equal amount of mass need to pass both ways to keep the balance?

Imagine wormholes at different heights in a gravity well - say a mass falls into the lower wormhole then emerges from the upper wormhole aimed at the lower again - would the mass keep gaining energy indefinitely, looping through the holes to ridiculous speeds? Would that drain energy from the wormholes instead? Do you have answers to these questions Mansouryar?

Oh, and qraal, if it was on a loop like the one you mentioned, it wouldn't keep gaining energy indefinately. On Earth it would hit 37 m/s then stop accelerating. What we might be able to do is to xract free enrgy from it, as once we extract energy the object would accelerate under gravity again. Any answers for that Mansouryar?

Hmmm... if I had one end of a wormhole with me and piloted into a black hole, saw what it was like beyond the event horizan, then hopped through the wormhole back to a safe distance, I wonder what would happen? Would the wormhole be destroyed, or would the black hole travel through the Wormhole and destroy wherever the other mouth was?

For the record, wormholes don't allow FTL.

But FTL isn't out of the question in GR so long as lightspeed isn't violated locally. So when travelling through a wormhole from A-to-B you don't go FTL at any point along the way, but a distant observer will see things quite differently.

Can you summarize your ideas please. Is it based on the Casimir effect?