Worm holes and space travel: Could â€˜Interstellarâ€™ actually happen?

Things are getting pretty dicey here on planet earth. ISIS is running amok, Ebola is spreading and Kim Kardashian is rumored to be trying for a second child. It might be time to leave this rock, and in Wednesday's sci-fi thriller "Interstellar," that's exactly what happens.

The movie — directed by Christopher Nolan, the man behind two great Batman movies and that third one — is set sometime in the near future, and the earth is dying. Crops, outside of corn, no longer grow, and America is suffocated by massive dust storms.

Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon

In an attempt to look for another habitable planet, a team of astronauts (Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley and David Gyasi) blasts off into the cold, unforgiving unknown.

The project was conceived by producer Lynda Obst and theoretical physicist, who also collaborated on 1997's "Contact." Like that film, "Interstellar" was intended to remain somewhat grounded in reality — or at least a possible reality.

"The story emerged from the fertile minds of the screenwriters, but always within the boundaries of established science or what we can reasonably extrapolate about concepts that are just beyond the frontiers of our knowledge," says Thorne.

Traveling to another world would be no easy task. Rocketing to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take about 70,000 years with current propulsion technology. Imagine how full your DVR would get back home.

Nolan and his co-writer brother, Jonathan, tapped an easier way to zip around the universe: a wormhole. The rip in space-time acts like a bridge between two distant points in the universe. One has never been observed, but scientists theorize that it might be possible to travel great distances using one. Fly into one end, pop out the other end millions of light years away — or even in a strange parallel universe. (Say, one where McConaughey never made "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.")

In "Interstellar," the wormhole is located near Saturn, and even getting to that distant planet — what amounts to next door in the vast universe — would be incredibly challenging. Unmanned crafts have taken as long as six years to cover the distance.

In the film, the characters make the long trip in a spaceship with 12 segments — four containing engines, four to house the astronauts and four holding landing pods. The ship spins at five times a minute to create gravity, which is probably a necessary component for a long-term space trip. Weightlessness might look like fun, but, over long periods of time, it destroys the body, atrophying muscles and deteriorating the cardiovascular system. Cosmonauts returning from the space station after a year are barely able to walk. Even speaking is difficult.

"Right after I landed, I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue," astronaut Chris Hadfield said in 2013 after five months in space. "I hadn't realized that I learned to talk with a weightless tongue."

The living quarters on the "Interstellar" ship contained hibernation pods for the astronauts to take yearslong naps, as would probably be necessary to keep the voyagers from having to pass the time by playing endless games of space Monopoly with one another.

Is cryosleep possible? Maybe one day. Scientists have already been able to place pigs, dogs and mice into suspended animation for a few hours.

While awake, McConaughey and Hathaway's characters spend most of their time in spacesuits. The costumes were designed by Oscar-nominated Mary Zophres and were based on existing looks.

"We tried to keep it recognizable as belonging to an astronaut in the 20th century, because we wanted to tap into that history," Christopher Nolan says. "We wanted to always be seeing a classic astronaut figure, [imagining] what they might look like in some undetermined future."

One bonus: The suits came equipped with oxygen units so the actors would be able to breathe when their helmets were on.

The costume also came with a built-in cooling system of tubes circulating water, like the kind actual spacesuits have, and, in total, the gear weighed between 30 and 35 pounds (compared to about three times that for a NASA suit). That weight doesn't include the wet suits McConaughey and Hathaway had to don for one sequence in which they land on a watery planet.

"When we were shooting the water scenes, Matthew and I kept saying to each other, 'This may be tough, but we look cool,' " Hathaway says.