What the title says. This is central to a story I am writing now, but as someone with no science background I'm having trouble deciding whether or not this would be plausible.
In your own fictional world...anything is.. 'plausible'. But, as far as non-fictional stories go.. I'm not much help there. :/
We can't prove that wormholes do exist and we can't prove that wormholes don't exist. Einstein theorized that wormholes couldn't be kept open for an extended period of time, they would appear and disappear very quickly. He also stated that matter passing through a wormhole would be destroyed, and the wormhole would collapse. Its theoretical physics, youtube has a lot of easy to understand videos.
Wormholes are a staple of modern science fiction. The theories regulating their behavior are not sufficiently established to put firm boundaries on what is possible or impossible, especially if there is an advanced technology augmenting them. For the purposes of good fiction, I would put inconvenient limits on them; unidirectional travel, limited time they can remain open, specific times and conditions for connections to occur, unreliable destination or unpredictable "death sentence" connections, limited aperture, etc. Make it too easy and your story may suffer.
I'd say, with the right explinations, anything is plausible, it's just coming up with something surrounding it that sounds reasonable and possible (given time). Doing some research on it and maybe looking at other stories that use wormholes could help you to developed a realistic and plausible idea behind it. You should keep in mind that how you write your story will help to make your idea plausible.
The right approach, it seems to me, is to suspend disbelief by understanding the current technical obstacles to such a wormhole and having your characters discuss the (imaginary) discoveries and inventions that overcame these. So you need to understand a bit of the science jargon. I'd start with this Wormhole FAQ. It's an excerpt from The Physics of Stargates -- Parallel Universes, Time Travel and the Enigma of Wormhole Physics by Enrico Rodrigo (2010).
Wormholes are one of the few things which could still be possible. So sure, they're feasible, even if not probable. Cogito's got some good ideas for limitations. Maybe hve the wormhole only open once a certain amount of energy is built up? For example, a big solar-powered antimatter factory, has to labour until enough antimatter is produced to power the wormhole for a minute or two, during which everything is rushed through, before it close for another year.
A little research would go a long way, based on the findings of scientists and what they know, and theorize, about wormholes today. As Cog said, there is a limited amount of information, so as long as you anchor it in some realistic evidence that can be proven today, the speculation regarding the things we do not know, pretty much allows for a lot of creativity. One of my recent stories includes a wormhole that sets an asteroid, roughly the size of Texas, straight on course for Earth, and causes the planet to implode. The story is an off-shoot of a novel I'm writing, and one of the concepts within deals with a form of time-travel. My characters are products of evolution, and they are using their brains at full capacity. This allows them to deconstruct their organic matter, returning to a natural state at a molecular level, and they can travel outside the Universal time-line. Now, it's not your typical sense of time-travel, because they aren't just going back in time, or into the future. I've developed a concept that coincides where each person has their own thread in the time-line, and when they travel outside it, they can essentially embody past or future lives, at any point along their thread. Right before the asteroid hits, my character 'leaps' back to one of his past lives, and is now pitted against the problem of having to figure out what he can do to prevent the asteroid from destroying Earth, and terminating his present life. If he spends too much time away from his present life, he will forget who he presently is, becoming stuck in the past or future life he leaped into. Where I am going with this, is the solution to the story dealt with the wormhole, and a lot of science involving anti-matter and positive/negative energy. A lot of which has been proven today, but never really put into place on a large scale. So, I took the facts, and created my own situation where something, using those facts and theories, allowed my characters to succeed. The way I handled it though, was since a lot of those facts are still not 100%.. I gave my characters a sense of doubt that they actually succeeded, in hopes it may hold more realism, within the story.
Yeah it seems plausible, but a wormhole is an incredibly rare occurance in the universe, so it seems like if it were to appear, there would be more potential to use it rather than just to go to mars. Mars isn't that far, so even a decent space shuttle or space colony could travel there in a few years and get the job done.
Readers will usually forgive pretty much anything that adds to the power of a story, and in the end, their entertainment. If it really enhances your story, the "no excuses" approach can work quite well. For example, the film "Another Earth" chose to completely ignore science in order to set up a scenario that enhanced the personal drama, which was the focus of the story. The writers could have chosen to spend half an hour of screen time on trying to make excuses for the scenario and make it more "probable", and it would have drawn attention away from what actually mattered in the story, and "probably" ruined it.
I think it would depend entirely upon the technology of the users. In other words, if it's humanity that built said wormhole, then you might want to go into the technology used to create it. You may also want to consider whether the ends "move" with the planets or if it's just sort of a spot in space near the solar orbits. One thought-there was a game back in the day called "Alpha Centauri" and one of it's technologies was the "Bulk Matter Transmitter". A nifty device that worked similar to "gates" a la stargate, which could transport a ship from point to point in space. A wormhole, naturally occuring, would probably be static(well, in my mind) unless it was controlled at both ends by some form of gate to which it could be "tethered". Whether the gate was a physical portal, or even simply a control device which could open the end to travel. Another thought-are you trying for near-instant travel? "Wormhole" might be a name for a path to allow this, though I think that it's generally assumed that wormholes take SOME time to travel, although they may suspend laws of physics. Be careful listening to me on these things, I get lost in details like this. lol
