Word: using
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...question we're dancing around: Can we keep discovering profound new truths about reality forever, or is the process finite? You seem to assume that because science has advanced so rapidly over the past few centuries, it will continue to do so, possibly forever. But this view is, to use your word, ahistorical, based on faulty inductive logic. In fact, inductive logic suggests that the modern era of explosive scientific progress might be an anomaly, a product of a singular convergence of social, intellectual and political factors. If you accept this, then the only question is when, not if, science...
...theory. In some versions, it proposes that what appear to us as particles are really stringlike loops that exist in a space-time with 10 dimensions. But we don't yet understand all the principles of this theory, and even if we did, we would not know how to use the theory to make predictions that we can test in the laboratory...
This rip in space-time, better known as a wormhole, could in theory serve as a shortcut to a distant part of the universe (characters on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine use wormholes the way New Yorkers use subways). But according to an idea proposed in the 1980s by Stephen Hawking, it could also lead out of our cosmos altogether, creating a "baby universe" that would then expand and grow, forming its own self-contained branch of space-time...
...Thorne, a physicist at Caltech, and several colleagues suggested that you could use such a wormhole to travel into the past. Here's how you do it: move one mouth of the wormhole through space at nearly the speed of light while leaving the other one fixed. Then jump in through the moving end. Like a moving astronaut, this end ages less, so it connects back to an earlier time on the fixed end. When you pop out through the fixed end an instant later, you'll find that you've emerged in your own past...
Ultimately, one can imagine scaling up the Starwisp by a factor of 1 million, so that the fishnet is big enough to carry human passengers to the stars. The radio transmitter to drive it would use far more power than all the power stations on earth now generate. Some day we may have this much power to spare for voyages of exploration, but not soon. Perhaps around the middle of the third millennium...