Quote:


Light itself is not curved, it can -be- curved when passing through a gravitational field, according to einstein's equivalence principle & special relativity.




I like to say, "Light always travels in a straight line, but not every observer agrees which way is 'straight'".

Quote:


As for Einstein, most of his stuff still stands, some of it has been dis proven, and there's no consensus on the shape the universe (which would also assume it had one),




The SR and GR equations essentially still stand: it's the interpretation of what it means that has been less successful over time. If you assume a constant in the equations has one value you get a 4-D concave universe; a different value gets 4-D convex.

As for wormholes there are lots of people who hope they *don't* exist. Any FTL scheme can be used to build a time machine, which would not only lead to effect preceding cause but would be a violation of quantum randomness (well-tested at this point). Not to mention wormholes having serious conservation-of-energy issues with respect to anything passing through one.

(I like Greg Egan's solution in the SF novel Disapora. The protagonist goes to tremendous effort creating a wormhole pair, only to discover ... that the inside path between the mouths is as long as the "outside" distance. so much for an easy way out!)

As for the "Billions of Earths" - that's ignoring an important point. Many, perhaps most, or the planets discovered so far aren't just big Jupiter-class planets, they're big planets that have spiraled in towards the star over time. Even if an Earth formed it would be unstable and long gone in such a system.

Since you have to have a Jupiter for life (in order to sweep the system clean of meteors and other debris) the question is how many systems have an Earth *and* have a Jupiter *and* that Jupiter isn't spiraling inwards.

Not to mention that most of the stars we see are actually binary systems and won't have planet systems like ours (because the angular momentum would have been completely different).
_________________________
"If they can't picture me with a knife, forcing them to strip in an alley, I don't want any part of it. It's humiliating." - windsock