BY SAMUEL ELLINGSON
STAFF WRITER
Time Travel. It seems fictional, like some intangible concept that has mind-boggled us in many forms of fictional entertainment. But what if it was genuinely possible to achieve in real life? Although our current technology is not up for the task, time travel is possible. There are three main ways that it could be done.
The first way, almost the simplest, is to go fast, really, really fast. As an object approaches the speed of light, it undergoes a phenomenon called time dilation. Think of it this way; if you were standing still and watching a train move by you, you could accurately guess how fast the train was moving. Now, if you were in a train that was moving alongside the first train, you would say that the train is not moving relative to you. This is basically how time dilation works. If a vessel travels round trip at 99% of the speed of light for 99% of a light year, people on earth would wait one year for the vessel to return. However, the people on board the vessel would perceive the time differently, only waiting around seven weeks. Since they perceive time differently, their bodies would not have aged as much, and essentially time traveled around 10 months.
Although it is hard to comprehend, it has been scientifically proven because it has actually happened! GPS systems move at high velocities (and have less gravity, which will be discussed later) and thus have to compensate for time dilation in their internal clocks. Russian Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev has spent the longest time in orbit, 803 days, and because of time dilation, has technically aged 0.02 seconds less than a normal human being on the surface of the Earth. He is living 0.02 seconds in the future!
Another way to induce time dilation is through the effects of gravity. While the Earth’s atmosphere provides little amounts of time dilation, a stronger source, such as a black hole, provides plenty. In a hypothetical situation, a clock is put six miles from a black hole with the mass of our sun. If the clock was allowed to orbit for an hour and ten minutes, the clock would only show that an hour has passed! Of course, this brings up the logistics of how we would manage to get a clock six miles from a black hole.
All of these scenarios are scientifically possible, but is it possible to go backwards in time? It brings up the question, why haven’t we met a time traveler from the future? Does their absence mean we never do figure out backwards time travel? Well, in order to travel backwards through time, you would have to go through a wormhole. Wormholes are theoretical bridges between space and time. To give a visual perspective, imagine a piece of paper with point A and point B on either side. The distance between those points is the length of the paper. However, a wormhole essentially folds the paper in half, making the two points touch. This is easy to imagine for a 2-dimensional object, but imagine folding a cube in half to connect its two corners, or two different years, connected through a tunnel. Not as easy! If you could somehow fly a vessel through one of these wormholes, you could travel to a space (and time) that was previous to the one you left!
Once again, there are logistical problems. First off, wormholes are theoretically really radioactive. But if we are able to detect, launch a ship towards, and fly through one, we probably have the technology for a satisfactory radiation shield. However, the other problem is that wormholes don’t necessarily have to be human-sized. They can be microscopic! It would take a lot more engineering to design a ship to fly through that!
While time travel is definitely possible to do in real life, to achieve the time travel that you see in the movies would take a lot more technology and engineering than we have at the time. But don’t lose hope. There were only 66 years between the invention of the plane and the first astronauts on the moon. We have extraordinary resolve and creative minds when it comes to building new things. Some day, we’ll figure it out. See you in the future!
-Sam from 8:59 PM, Thursday 10/6/2022.
Sources used:
https://www.livescience.com/time-travel-beginners-guide.html
https://www.livescience.com/what-is-time-dilation
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10/23/sergei-krikalev-time-travel_n_4147793.html