Little Tiny Wormholes

 I'm not talking about those little holes that appear in your yard after a summer rain, the ones made by actual worms. No, I'm talking about the wormholes that hook various points in spacetime together. Or as Wikipedia puts it:

"A wormhole is a hypothetical structure connecting disparate points in spacetime, and is based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations.^[1] A wormhole can be visualized as a tunnel with two ends at separate points in spacetime (i.e., different locations, different points in time, or both)."

OK, now that that is clear, a wormhole can zip things around the universe willy-nilly. One moment a thingy is here, the next it is somewhere and sometime else. So what does that have to do with you and me? Glad you asked. I have a theory. No, I have no training in theoretical physics, but if the richest man in the world, with no training in political science, can shrug off the bothersome chains of sanity to shill for another purported billionaire, I figure that opens the door for all sorts of idle speculation.

So here is my theory. Most speculation regarding wormholes is cosmic in nature - black holes at the center of galaxies, galaxies crashing into one another creating universe-wide gravity waves, mysterious entities light years away. Really huge Star Wars kinds of stuff. 

My theory brings the idea of wormholes into a much smaller conceptual space, like your house, garage, kitchen, etc. Let me cite an example.

Yesterday I was organizing stuff in the garage. Yeah, I know we moved months and months ago. Another year and we might get "moved in." Anyhow, I was moving a couple of items from one corner of the garage to another. I carried them in a plastic container, removed the items from the container and placed them on the shelf. Then I turned around and the plastic container had vanished. 

Now I am aware that another phenomenon could be in play here, the "where did I put my keys" issue. This occurs when we misplace an item that reappears minutes, hours or days later. "Ah ha! There you are!" This "missing keys" phenomenon occurs with increasing regularity as we move through our maturity. The "Tiny Little Wormhole" phenomenon, or TLW for short, is a completely different animal. Items that get sucked into a TLW are gone for good, never to be seen again. 

Think about it. You have your own examples, but were perhaps unaware of what was going on. That favorite sweater you looked for last week as the weather began to change. The flat head screwdriver you put on the bench. The Winnie the Pooh PJs with the footies. You name it - gone and never ever to be seen again.

There are some ramifications to TLWs that we may not have considered. When these things disappear from our place in spacetime they reappear somewhere else. There is a common trope in sci-fi literature that earth is in a sort of probationary period that will determine whether we are invited to join a highly sophisticated inter-galactic community. Most of these narratives do not end well for us, usually because of our tribe-like arrogance which culminates in violent genocide of some type or another.That may just be a cheap-shot plot device. 

There could be a more subtle reason for our exclusion: bad TLW management. That more advanced community has long learned to manage the TLWs. Things that disappear in the Greater Galactic Community (GGC) are actually funneled to specific regions of the universe in need of specific items: think recycling. We, however, just let things zip away. Think letting your dog off-leash to do its business wherever and making no effort to clean it up. By failing to understand and control our TLWs, we are trashing random parts of the universe.

That gets entered into the debit side of our galactic ledger, along with global warming, genocide, and the ever-increasing web of satellites we toss up blocking the communication paths of the galactic observers. Whew.

So what do we do to reverse this seemingly negative spiral? I think there is great potential benefit to addressing the issue at the TLW level. It seems logical (well, as logical as anything in this admittedly fanciful ramble) that TLWs are encouraged by our neglect. They snarf up random things to which we are not paying attention. So we need to keep our stuff better organized. Clean out the junk drawer. Put your tools, spices, clothes in planned spaces. This, I believe will thwart the TLWs and increase our chances of being accepted into the Greater Galactic Federation.

I must, however, admit to doing none of those things I advise above. I lean sharply toward the slovenly. Which is, no doubt, why TLWs swarm around me like mosquitoes on a summer evening. I suppose that, in order to increase earth's chances of GGF membership, I should clean up my act.

OK, I will. Starting tomorrow.