“If we were to shrink the Solar System, with all its planets, down to the size of an orange, the other oranges (representing other stars) would be about a kilometre away,” says Dr Vytautas Stankus, a KTU physicist, offering an unusual perspective on all things space.
In the interview below, he discusses finding an alternative sun for our planet, which involves travelling through time, and the fact that, despite all technological progress, human civilisation is still at the bottom of the development ladder.
However, Dr Stankus believes that there are no limits to scientific achievements, that is, if we behave: “The only real boundaries are our inability to manage ourselves. It is the 21st century, and the world stands on the brink of a third world war.”
Astrophysicists have calculated that in the distant future, our galaxy, the Milky Way, is expected to collide with the Andromeda galaxy. The two should merge into one large galaxy – Milkomeda. What would happen to all the major planets of the Solar System and, of course, to Earth if such a collision were to occur?
Although on a cosmic scale the collision of galaxies is a dramatic event – two streams of interstellar gas collide, igniting billions of new stars; previously orderly galactic disks become distorted, merge into one another, pass through and around each other, separate and eventually merge again; two supermassive black holes collide, releasing an incomprehensible amount of energy – this will have almost no effect on planets and their systems.
Stars within galaxies are extremely far apart from one another. I once calculated that if we were to shrink the Solar System, with all its planets, down to the size of an orange, the other oranges (representing other stars) would be about a kilometre away.
Therefore, the probability of stars colliding is close to zero. The merging process, by the way, will be very long – about 2 billion years. So, the changes and the formation of a new elliptical galaxy will unfold over an extremely long period. This is what awaits us in around 4.5 billion years. However, if we make it that far, we will be facing a much more serious problem – the death of our Sun.
If humanity survives a million times longer than the entire span of our civilisation since ancient Egypt, we will have to find another planet, or somehow fly Earth to another star.
Finding another planet and making it suitable for humanity – there are plenty of suggestions in the public space that by 2050, there could already be a populated city on Mars. But moving an entire planet to another star, you must agree, is something far beyond utopia.
Everything depends on which assumptions and theories we choose to follow. It is true that directly moving the Earth to another star would be impossible. But let us think differently. Based on Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which has been confirmed many times, we know that gravity is the result of space-time curvature.
From this theory, it follows that space-time can be bent to the point of forming what is known as a wormhole – a geometric structure that connects two distant points in space through the shortest possible route. It is a tunnel that has no length but connects two parts of the universe separated by any distance.
By the way, Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Kip Thorne has proposed a way to create an artificial wormhole. If humanity could learn to control space-time, realising such an object would become merely an engineering challenge.
In this way, we would need to create a wormhole with an inner radius larger than the Earth’s dimensions, place it in its orbit, then find another suitable star and create or open the ‘second end’ of the tunnel in a favourable orbit around that star.
As Earth continued its normal orbital motion, it would enter the ‘mouth’ of the wormhole and emerge on the other side. Ideally, Earth and its inhabitants would not even notice they had ended up in the orbit of a completely different star. Of course, there are a few ‘technical difficulties’ – a wormhole is somewhat similar to a black hole, just with a different geometric shape.
So, we can imagine the kind of energies that would be required to create and control it. If left uncontrolled, such a ‘stellar gate’ could rip our planet apart down to its quarks. Therefore, we would need to construct a sort of shield to maintain a stable region of space inside the wormhole.
By the way, Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Kip Thorne has proposed a way to create an artificial wormhole. If humanity could learn to control space-time, realising such an object would become merely an engineering challenge.
Physicists have already shown that they can merge enormous energies – take nuclear energy, for example. One can explode a bomb, or one can subtly control nuclear reactions in a reactor.
Similarly, we would need to develop a theory and tools that allow us to manipulate space-time at a microscopic or quantum level, enabling the construction of complex structures from the fabric of space-time itself. Such theories – like superstring theory, M-theory, and quantum gravity – are currently being developed.
There are also non-technical difficulties – bending space-time also bends time itself and its flow, so travelling through a wormhole might place us in an entirely different time. But would it matter which era of the universe we live in? Unless, of course, we had already established contact with other civilisations, or we accidentally arrived at the end of the universe, where stars no longer exist.
As you can see, this way of thinking raises more questions than answers. Of course, this is all fantasy – but it does not contradict any known physical laws or hypotheses. It is also worth noting that wormholes have not yet been detected.
There is a concept called the Kardashev Scale, which classifies civilizations by their level of energy usage: Type I harnesses the energy of its home star (in our case, the Sun), Type II controls processes within the star itself, Type III colonizes an entire galaxy, Type IV uses the energy of the entire universe, and Type V controls processes throughout the universe.
We are still at the very beginning of becoming a Type I civilisation – currently just passive observers. Sure, we can move an asteroid in ‘our backyard’, and maybe we will manage to send humans to Mars, but beyond that, not much else. Reaching the stars requires entirely different tools based on deeper physics and far more advanced engineering.
However, theoretically, there are no limits. The only real boundaries are our inability to manage ourselves. It is the 21st century, and the world stands on the brink of a third world war.
War is, in any case, a catastrophe for any civilisation, but the death of the sun is a disaster not just for our planet. According to NASA researchers, when the Sun begins to die, it will expand into a red giant and grow so large that it will engulf Mercury and Venus.
Dying of the Sun is certainly not a problem. Measurements show that around 6-7 new stars ignite each year in the Milky Way galaxy – that is roughly one new star every two months.
And if interstellar travel based on manipulating space-time becomes feasible, reaching another galaxy will also not be an issue. It wouldn’t even be necessary to search for a newly forming star – existing stars could be just as suitable.
Let me remind you: the number of galaxies in the universe is roughly comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way – several hundred billion.
You mentioned that humans might eventually succeed in travelling to Mars. Travelling there might be possible, but will we be able to adapt to the new environment? For example, the United States astronauts who have spent nine months aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have rather serious health issues; it is said that not all of them will fully recover.
From a technical and engineering perspective, creating suitable, health-friendly conditions aboard spacecraft is not a fundamental problem. In this case, it is merely a matter of resources. In other words, if there is enough will, we can build a massive and comfortable space vessel that replicates Earth’s conditions – perhaps even improves upon them.
What concerns me more is the psychological challenges that humanity is likely to face when carrying out very long-term projects. We are all children of the Earth, bound to its day-night cycle, seasonal rhythms, the stages and duration of life, and we act to achieve quick results. That is the driving force of our motivation.
Projects, such as communism, aside from their other aspects, were essentially doomed to fail because their outcomes were oriented towards a distant, bright future for future generations. The human psyche is not built to operate, endure, or sacrifice for a result that might only come in a vague future.
Such problems are also explored in the film Voyagers by Neil Burger (inspired by William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies), where a colony of children is sent on a journey to another planet that would only be reached by their grandchildren.
In the sci-fi trilogy The Three-Body Problem by Chinese author Liu Cixin, one scenario deals with humanity learning that it will most likely be destroyed by another civilisation in 400 years.
Try to truly imagine this, and you will understand that it creates a deeply uncomfortable psychological paradox. That is why projects, such as colonising Mars, bring not only technical or physiological health challenges, but serious psychological ones too.
On the other hand, if the vision is compelling enough, humans are incredibly adaptable beings. So, why not?
