I recently finished reading ‘The Permanent Implosion’ by Dean McLaughlin, the premise of the story is that a scientific accident in the continental US has created a small wormhole (its described as looking like a sphere a couple of feet wide) with one end in ground-level atmosphere of Earth and the other opening into interstellar space.
In the story of course they improvise a solution but for the purposes of this thread assume it continues to function, how long would it take for the air-pressure globally to take a noticeable dip, and then how much longer for humanity to really be in trouble? (leaving aside the destruction caused in the immediate surroundings?)
It would take hundreds of thousands of years for the ocean to drain. He doesn’t seem to address what happens when all the water in that ocean is gone and we’re losing atmosphere, though.
The atmosphere wouldn’t leak out. There must be just as much gravitational potential difference between the ends of the wormhole as there would be between those points through normal space, and it’d therefore take just as much energy to get a mass from here to there either way. It might be a shorter trip through the wormhole, but that doesn’t matter.
That would have to depend on the properties o the wormhole. It might do nest to nothing. Suppose you took a tube a couple of feet foot wide and set it up with one end at sea level and the other end in space. Then uncapped both ends. Air would rush in to fill the vacuum, but it would stop doing so once the air in the tube matched the surrounding atmosphere. After all the atmosphere is open to space. If the worm hole acted like that, there’s not be much damage.
If the wormhole acted like a tube of no length, though, I’d think there would be trouble. I’m not sure what conservation of energy does though. The air acquires a great deal of gravitational potential energy once it gets transported into space. Where does that energy come from?
The tube wouldn’t be zero length, but it could be a very short length. That just means that the gravitational field would be that much stronger inside the wormhole, to make up for the decreased length. If it’s not, then it’s magic, not scientific, and you might as well just call it a “portal” instead of a “wormhole”.