Hello Folks
I wonder if wormholes exist? Sometimes the lines between science fiction and science get a little blurry. If they do, they probably aren't interstellar travel hubs like most SF seems to think!
Chapter 19 of HHGG opens with the statement that "careless talk costs lives....at the very moment that Arthur said 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,' a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy" where a war is about to start. Arthur's words pop up across a negotiating table but it seems in their language it is
"the most dreadful insult imaginable" and a centuries long interstellar battle begins. The ships travel for years "and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across -- which happened to be the earth -- where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."
That was not easy to condense! but it's one of my favourite images in the book.
Thinking literally, here is a worm in a hole. It probably should be a red hole so as to be in an apple, but somehow it ended up blue.
My quilled inchie reflects how I think of SF wormholes with a big opening tapering to a small end part:
Guess the moral of Adams story is to be careful what you say, even if it seems completely innocent.
Have a good week.