Time Travel To The Future

The Future is Nearer than you Think!

Is time travel to the future possible?

This is a question that people have debated for centuries, but in fact we don't need to speculate about whether it is possible anymore and haven't for a long time.

Interestingly, many people, probably most, are not aware of that fact - time travel to the future is absolutely possible and has been proven through human experiment... the reason most of us don't realise this is that the time travel performed to date has only been by fractions of a second rather than centuries.

However, the reason time travel in terms of a large amount of time is not possible for us at the moment is due to the technical constraints and us not having the requisite technology, rather than theory - we know exactly how to do it.

As Quick As You Can

There are two ways in which you can travel to the future. The main method and that tested on earth is to travel a lot faster than the place you want to travel to the future of. As a simple example, imagine you leave planet earth on a space shuttle that is going not too far off light speed. Travel around for what seems to you to be a relatively short period of time, and you can return to earth to find that a thousand years have passed! (The exact time differential based on the speed you travel at and how much time you experience passing can be easily calculated).

Now you might think this is science fiction, but it is fact. Tests have been done keeping an object stationery and one moving quickly for instance in an aircraft, and the tiny time differential between them measured to prove this effect.

If we were able to build craft capable of speed approaching light speed and they could carry humans then that ship would allow you to time travel.

This is mind boggling and why many think it must be wrong - how can merely going quickly make time pass more quickly? The answer is given by special relativity, one of Einstein's two famous theories of relativity.

The faster you go, time ticks slower for you than for those looking on from a stationary or slower moving frame of reference (if they could look on it would appear everything was going very slowly, for you on board it would appear normal). And hence in this way you can time travel.

There is a second way to time travel, and that is to experience intense gravitational force (which would actually crush you of course), if you were able to survive near the event horizon of a black hole then you would again be able to time travel as intense gravitational forces also make time tick more slowly - this is why GPS satellites always have to have their time corrected so that they sync up, as the fractional differences of a second in the way their internal clocks tick would be enough to render the whole system useless on earth.

Author: Dan

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Last Updated: Jan 31st 2008

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