We Are All Time Travellers

[Twighlight]

Something a great many people fail to realise is that not only does 'time travel' exist.....but it's an activity that most of us partake in almost every day.

No....not the John Titor sort of time travel. But time travel all the same.

Every time you hop in your car and drive down the road, you are a time traveller. The relativistic effect at such speeds is incredibly small.....we are talking trillionths of a second. But it is there nonetheless...and you arrive home a trillionth of a second younger than anyone who stayed behind.

Even at the sort of speeds that the International Space Station travels at....17,000 miles an hour...the effect is still very small, but measurable. It is estimated that after a year on the ISS, an astronaut is one second younger than he would have been had he stayed on Earth. Not only is the relativistic effect measurable....but things like GPS satelites have to actually take into account the slowing of time in order to maintain accurate onboard clocks.

So the answer to 'Is time travel possible ?' is most certainly 'Yes....it goes on all the time'

However, this is 'relative'-istic time travel....made possible by the fact that any sort of motion makes the rest of the world 'speed up' relative to you, and by the fact that there is no single unique time frame ( hence relativity ). It is ONLY possible to 'travel forwards' in time this way.

We are all 'time travellers'. But we simply don't notice it because the effect in everyday life is so small. So the question 'Do you believe in time travel ?' is a meaningless one....as it has long since been proven that time travel exists.

Of course...that's all a far cry from travelling back in time from 2036 and grabbing an IBM computer in 1975. But the prevalence of hoaxes should not lead people to say 'I don't believe in time travel'. It exists. It is real.

 

[dimaggio]

That's true, but when people speak about time travel, they will most probably mean travelling into the past. And when they mean the travel into the future they sure as hell mean to get there faster than with their everyday speed. Nobody seriously speaks of time travel when they mean the "normal" speed forwards.^^

 

[Twighlight]

Sure...but time travel into the future is 'merely' an extension of what we are already doing - by adding greater speed.

Fact is, the ISS astronauts are ALREADY time travellers. There just weren't any world headlines......but it is undeniable that time travel into the future has already occured.

It is sort of an irony, really, that the first measurable time travel has already taken place and almost nobody seems to have recognised it as such.

 

[dimaggio]

Ok, but the "future" they arrive in isn't really significantly much apart in time from the rest of the world.... yet. One could "just" slow down his own time in relation to the outer time for 5 years. After that he will have travelled forward in time for about 5 years. From his perspective the outside world would move at an insane speed (if he could see it, I haven't thought about the light yet) and the outside world would think he stands still for 5 years.
But the real deal, and this is what I personally consider time travel when I speak about time travel, is travelling BACK in time, since that is not something we're already capable of.

 

[Twighlight]

But the real deal, and this is what I personally consider time travel when I speak about time travel, is travelling BACK in time, since that is not something we're already capable of.

Hmm. Some recent experiments have demonstrated quantum entanglement at classical physics scales ( a result not expected ). As such entanglement is 'superluminal', information is effectively transmitted 'back in time' between the entangled particles.

This is effectively backwards time travel of information. The trouble is, one would need a device the size of the solar system even to just transmit information back one day.