Lets say that you have a wormhole where both ends are attractive. Here an object starts far away from rest, accelerates towards the wormholes mouth, travels through the throat at a small fraction of light, then come out the other end and decelerates as you travel away. Now lets say someone "clogs" the wormhole by dumping lots of matter into the wormhole through both ends at once, resulting in the matter staying inside. This would make safely travelling through the wormhole impossible as any ship that passed thorugh would burn up like a sattelite falling from orbit. How would someone "unclog" the wormhole and make it safe to travel through?
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$\begingroup$ Close-vote withdrawn. I've also added a couple of useful tags to ping those with the relevant interests. Feel free to roll-back the tag-edit or re-edit as you see fit. $\endgroup$– Escaped dental patient.Dec 3, 2021 at 2:22
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$\begingroup$ no worry the wormhole will likely eat all the unprotected debris and spare your ship which is equipped to survive the trip ;D $\endgroup$– user6760Dec 3, 2021 at 3:53
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$\begingroup$ Are you specifically looking for a method for an human (or alien) agent to unclog a wormhole, or more generally for a mechanism to keep wormholes unclogged? If the latter you could handwave some physical phenomena that results in matter stuck in a wormhole to radiate away at some convenient rate (maybe in a manner similar to Hawking radiation.) Might be unhealthy to be near the mouths as it happens though! :D $\endgroup$– GeneDec 3, 2021 at 7:31
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$\begingroup$ I'm looking for a method for a human agent to unclog the wormhole. $\endgroup$– blademan9999Dec 3, 2021 at 7:58
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$\begingroup$ I'm not really seeing the mechanism by which it stays clogged. If you throw a bunch of debris at it, won't it come out the other side? $\endgroup$– CadenceDec 3, 2021 at 8:11
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3 Answers
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Dump antimatter "cleansing agent"
Provided you can accurately measure how much matter is clogging your wormhole, you just need to add the same amount of antimatter. The two will annihilate, and the resultant gamma radiation will escape the wormhole leaving it nice and clean.
Flush it out
Alternatively just giving it a good relativistic hosing down with regular matter may do the trick too: part of the momentum of the additional material will be transferred to the matter clogging the wormhole and bring it out to a distance where it can be captured. Repeat the process until the wormhole is sufficiently clean.
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$\begingroup$ Best to combine both methods. A relativistic speed flush with antimatter. To make sure things are really clean. $\endgroup$– WillkDec 4, 2021 at 16:01
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2$\begingroup$ In general brute force is a good idea. Unlike a metal pipe, your wormhole can't be destroyed by explosives. Note: antimatter water is equivalent to 1.3*10^16 PSI on your pressure washer. $\endgroup$ Dec 4, 2022 at 2:50
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Using extremely high powered lasers to vaporize the materials and blow the gas into space. Or using some kinetic projectile to push or scoop out the material, pushing it to over the wormholes escape velocity.
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A shovel
Assuming the matter itself is just space rocks and dust, you can just shovel it into space. You just need to fling it at at least the escape velocity of the wormhole. (This should be done by robots, obviously.)
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$\begingroup$ Your robots are going to be inside at the end, which is a problem because you don't want the exhaust from the thrusters re-cloggin the wormhole. $\endgroup$ May 26 at 13:15