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I'm building a story about a world where it has been discovered how to travel to any possible universe according to the many-worlds interpretation, and there's a company which is in charge of sending and returning you (if you want) to any universe you desire with a specification you give them of that universe.

I'd like my story to be a 5 on Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, but the biggest problem seems to come in the energy that would be needed to create a worm hole where a person could go, I'm assuming that this world has a technology to achieve energy to create the worm hole as an almost 100% of efficiency of the E=mc^2 equation, which is quite a lot in even not too big quantities of mass, but even that may even be a extremely insufficient compared to the one needed to open a worm hole to some certain quantum universe.

How much energy would be theoretically necessary for that considered it could be done?

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  • $\begingroup$ Should this be hard-science? $\endgroup$
    – Christopher King
    Commented Apr 15, 2018 at 14:53
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    $\begingroup$ @PyRulez The hard-science tag should only be used when OP actually requires answers with scientific references. It's perfectly fine to ask a hard-ish science question and not need answers to be backed up by specific scientific references; for such questions, using science-based is perfectly enough. $\endgroup$
    – user
    Commented Jul 16, 2018 at 10:45

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"I'd like my story to be a 5 on Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness...."

Practical wormholes, as a major part of your plot, are your "one big lie" and categorise your story as 4 on the scale.

The wormhole example literally appears 3 times on the page for http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Mohs/OneBigLie

Because the technology is 100% fictional you can have it work any way you want without relevant limits, because there are no relevant limits because it is 100% fictional.

Maybe you can open a wormhole with an AA battery if you use it just right. Maybe you have to burn an entire galaxy ?

It might be helpful to think of "speculative sci-fi"(Moh 5) in terms of what more grounded professions like engineers might speculate might be possible extrapolating from whats currently known. As opposed to the kind of extremely speculative advanced theoretical physics and maths papers that sometimes get published by respectable scientists that discuss possibilities like exotic matter and wormholes etc.

That said, don't let Mohs limit your creativity. A higher Mohs number doesn't equal higher quality fiction. It's just a genre category.

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There are no easy answers to this question. The energy required can be calculated by solving some equations using the energy momentum tensor, but unfortunately the actual energy this takes is very situation dependent. In fact, no closed form solution exists for any situation except a few highly symmetrical ones.

The big challenge is managing the requirements on exotic matter. You need all sorts of strange things like negative energy or repulsive gravity for which we have seen no evidence that they exist. Wormhole lovers hope that they have something to do with dark matter and dark energy, but we simply don't know.

Of course, if your wormhole is between universes, we literally have no equations to even begin answering the question with.

An interesting detail is that energy is conserved in the equations which predict wormholes. This means that whenever you make a wormhole, it must cost enough energy to ensure that nobody can cheat the laws of physics and create an infinite energy source by creating 2 alternating wormholes near a black hole playing catch with some heavy mass. If you try, the complicated equations governing the energy required to bend spacetime catch up to you, and make sure you have to spend at least enough energy to keep things equal. This means that a nefarious person might be able to use one wormhole to make the next wormhole more expensive to create!

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The answer is, "However much you need/want it to be."

But if they've figured out how to breech the barriers separating the multiverse, then they've probably also figured out how to make 'zero point' energy work. Or some other handwavium powered energy source.

My (limited) understanding is that the many-worlds interpretation isn't actually provable, even if it is correct, because breaching the barriers between realities isn't possible. Therefore it isn't a testable hypothesis. So your energy requirements would theoretically be infinite, and therefore not possible.

This obviously wouldn't work well in your story, so I fall back to "Whatever seems reasonable, with an appropriate sounding energy source that 'taps into the hidden energy of the multi-verse.'

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