Ways to Time Travel

I’m time traveling. So are you. We’re moving at the speed of one hour per hour. We are moving always forward towards the future.

Of course, when we speak of time travel most people think about speeding up or slowing down time or visiting the past or looking at the future.

Einstein wasn’t a believer in the constant, linear construct that most of us operate within. He actually proved that time changes depending on your position in space.

I’m sitting at my laptop at the desk looking out the window and occupying the three dimensions of space – length, width and height – but, though I’m seemingly motionless, I am moving forward in that fourth dimension of time.

Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity proposes that time does not pass at the same rate for everyone. If you are an observer or you’re the one traveling and being observed, time moves at different speeds.

The people in the International Space Station are moving faster in space through time than we are on Earth. But not much faster. If we could travel at 186,282 miles per second. (speed of light) then time slows down. Your clock runs slow relative to people who are still. Travel that way and you could return many years in the future.

If we could go faster than the speed of light (670 million mph), one year on that timecraft would equal 223 years on Earth.

Of course, Einstein is a time travel spoiler because he said that anything with a mass cannot physically reach the speed of light. So much for that time machine.

Sci-Fi folks like to offer the warp drive for time travel. Yes, this is a Star Trek thing but scientists have picked up on it. What warps is the fabric of space-time. Planets, stars, constellations – all of the universe is on that fabric.  Our timecraft would push up the fabric of space in front of it causing a bubble of space-time we could travel on and we wouldn’t be traveling faster than light.

I won’t even try to discuss traveling via cosmic strings which would enable our timecraft to attach onto them and fly through space at amazing speeds which might allow time travel.

As intriguing as time travel is to me, I have no hope that we can do it. So, I will continue to move at one hour per hour into the future and think about the past and guess at the future and try to slow down the present.