When this baby hits 88mph...

There’s something very comforting when a scientist as well regarded as Stephen Hawking admits to keeping quiet for fear of “being labeled a crank” reports Chris Matyszczyk for CNET.com. “Thankfully, he seems to have conquered his fears in a new documentary series for the Discovery Channel, in which he has already considered how man might truly conquer space – Or, indeed, how spacemen might come down to our meager Earth and dismember us as so much fast food,” reports Matyszczyk.

According to Matyszczyk , “Hawking has already warned in his documentary that we should be very wary about making contact with beings from out there. “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans,” he said in ‘Stephen Hawking’s Universe.’”

“But, as he presented his latest ideas about what travel in the future might resemble, he reportedly admitted that he had kept quiet on the subject for fear of being labeled a heretic by the scientific community,” reports Matyszczyk.

According to Hawking, “Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I’m not so cautious.”

“Physicists have been thinking about tunnels in time too, but we come at it from a different angle. We wonder if portals to the past or the future could ever be possible within the laws of nature. As it turns out, we think they are. What’s more, we’ve even given them a name: wormholes. The truth is that wormholes are all around us, only they’re too small to see.”

“Unfortunately, these real-life time tunnels are just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimetre across. Way too small for a human to pass through – but here’s where the notion of wormhole time machines is leading. Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.”

“There’s a cosmic speed limit, 186,000 miles per second, also known as the speed of light. Nothing can exceed that speed. It’s one of the best established principles in science. Believe it or not, travelling at near the speed of light transports you to the future.”