Word: distantly
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...there might be other worlds and other life-forms beyond Earth. In our Star Trekking age, it's now almost heretical not to believe in extraterrestrial life--a belief that will surely be fortified by last week's announcement of the discovery of two Saturn-size planets around two distant stars...
Drake, alas, detected nary a peep. Nor has anyone else since then. Even after spending thousands of hours scanning the skies, at myriad frequencies, at a cost of more than $100 million astronomers have yet to detect a single credible signal, though the most distant star probed is barely 1% of the way across the galaxy...
This rip in space-time, better known as a wormhole, could in theory serve as a shortcut to a distant part of the universe (characters on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine use wormholes the way New Yorkers use subways). But according to an idea proposed in the 1980s by Stephen Hawking, it could also lead out of our cosmos altogether, creating a "baby universe" that would then expand and grow, forming its own self-contained branch of space-time...
...have provided the answer. His 1915 theory of general relativity showed that space and time are curved, and that the curvature can be large in the neighborhood of very massive objects. If an object is dense enough, the curvature can become nearly infinite, perhaps opening a tunnel that connects distant regions of space-time as though they were next door. Physicists call this tunnel a wormhole, in an analogy to the shortcut a worm eats from one side of a curved apple to the other...
...general-relativity equations, might not have subsided altogether back when the inflationary hiccup ended. Instead, it might still be there, lurking in empty space and urging expansion along, like an usher politely shooing playgoers back into the theater at intermission's end. Some observations of exploding stars in distant galaxies suggest the presence of just such an ongoing inflationary impulse. If so, the tug-of-war over the future of the universe involves not only expansion and gravitational braking but also the subtle turbocharging of lingering inflation, which acts to keep the universe expanding indefinitely...