In the early universe and perhaps in other energy-rich environments, the conditions are right for producing natural self-stabilizing wormholes, without the need to invoke advanced civilizations to create them. Such wormholes, created in the Big Bang during the inflationary phase and afterward, might be around today, spanning small or vast distances in space and of varying sizes, or waiting only to be found and expanded to a usable size. They might even connect one bubble-universe with another from which it is otherwise completely isolated. I used lore from the rotating, ringhole solutions in the physics literature. The paper to consult is “Microlensing by Natural Wormholes: Theory and Simulations” by Margarita Safonova, Diego F. Torres, and Gustavo E. Romero, in Physical Review D (November 29, 2001).

An overall view is given in Michele Maggiore, Gravitational Waves, Volume 1: Theory and Experiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

My own contribution to this is in “Natural Wormholes as Gravitational Lenses,” cowritten with John G. Cramer, Robert L. Forward, Michael S. Morris, Matt Visser, and Geoffrey A. Landis, published in Physical Review D (March 15, 1995).

I suppose I explored these ideas both in scientific papers and in fiction because of my sense of smell, thinking these exotica had the right flavor. The center of the toroid is a separated ellipsoid of spacetime, as in this sketch:

This novel has many ideas, indeed. The most likely, I feel, is the Marsmat in subsurface caverns. If life began on Mars, it could easily migrate into the underground, as it did on Earth when oxygen became common in its air. If it persists there, we should find it through exploring the many caves we know are there. For nearly two decades now, methane spurts in the Martian atmosphere have appeared, yet fit no model of the planet—except emissions from subsurface microbial life. Yet NASA does nothing to explore the many Martian caves they could enter with rovers. This Mat is the idea behind my The Martian Race of 1999, which asks how such might evolve, absent an oxygen-rich biosphere above it. This also animates the following novel, The Sunborn, which has even more forms of strange life—including intelligent plasmas.

I thank Jack McDevitt, Fred Lerner, Brenda Cox Giguere, Dave Truesdale, James Benford, and friends for useful comments on the manuscript and earlier stories.

Gregory Benford

March 2021

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GREGORY BENFORD is a physicist, educator, and author. He received a BS from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD from the University of California, San Diego. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. He has served as an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA, and the White House Council on Space Policy. He is the author of more than twenty novels, including In the Ocean of Night, Heart of the Comet (with David Brin), Foundation’s Fear, Bowl of Heaven (with Larry Niven), Timescape, and The Berlin Project. A two-time Nebula Award winner, Benford has also won the Astounding Award (formerly the John W. Campbell Award), the Australian Ditmar Award, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature. In 1995 he received the Lord Foundation Award for contributions to science and the public comprehension of it. He has served as scientific consultant to the NHK network and for Star Trek: The Next Generation.