Informative Article
Time travel. Amidst the many supposed time travelers, modern science isn’t able to completely debunk all these conspiracies and confirm an answer to the question: “is time travel possible?”
by Sindu Vipparthy
Time travel. You know, you step foot in a long box-like machine, there’s a loud whoosh, and you’re conjured up in an ancient or futuristic dimension. It’s definitely something you’ve heard of before.
Popular sci-fi films center around the aspect of time travel and it’s even been one of the most famed conspiratorial topics for decades. Yet, would you believe me if I said it was possible to bring it to life?
Probably not. Right?
Well, in fact, you’re wrong. Partly wrong. We already have quite a bit of information thanks to Einstein and his theory of relativity. However, his methods prove to be lethal to anyone who would try to undergo the process.
However, throughout history, we have seen cases in which supposed time travelers venture through different dimensions of time. Different parallel universes. And they’ve all undergone the process and made it out alive. And by modern science, this is impossible.
And that’s where the trilemma is presented. Should we believe modern science which deems time travel practically impossible or should we consider the cases of numerous time travelers throughout our history? Or is there perhaps a neutral stance? Well, let’s find out.
Time Travel is Basically Impossible:
Many people, back before Albert Einstein came into play, believed that time was constant. It was the same for every single being. And Einstein proved this wrong.
Einstein’s theory of relativity states that time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast an object moves relative to another. He theorizes that when mass is placed on the four-dimensional arena of space-time, it will bend that fabric, causing objects to move in a curved path called gravity.
Einstein’s theory of relativity was proven by our GPS satellite technology that revolves around the Earth’s atmosphere: these satellites, which have extremely precise timepieces onboard, move faster than perceived by humans on the surface. This, adding to the effects of gravity, makes the satellite travel slower through time, adding 38 microseconds a day to uncalibrated clocks on Earth. So hypothetically, if a person resided in the satellite, they would be very slightly younger than everyone on Earth.
We could conjure up another hypothetical scenario without taking the realistics into consideration. Let’s say an astronaut in a spaceship was traveling at a rapid speed, approaching the speed of light. Time would theoretically move slower for them and they would return to Earth slightly younger than a hypothetical identical twin that remained on Earth.
This occurrence is called time dilation. It’s a very slight adjustment yet nothing close to the immensity of time travel.
This technically means that scenarios, in which travelers would go back or forth in time, would actually exist. However, these do have a few limitations.
The first scenario would require an object to travel faster than light (to put it into perspective, that’s 670,615,200 miles per hour) within a vacuum. However, Einstein’s equations declare that the object would have infinite mass, but a length of zero. And if you’re wondering, we don’t fit those requirements. Not even close.
The next scenario would be to create a wormhole between space-time. And again, even though Einstein’s equations do accommodate for time travel through wormholes, they would collapse very quickly and only allow microscopic particles. Additionally, scientists have never studied wormholes, and we’re not nearly close to having the technology to create one.
Alternate theories, that weren’t generated by Einstein, propose ways in which humans might have some chance at time travel. But as usual, they all have their limits, so no promises.
Black holes have also been a center of attention concerning time travel. Some scientists have proposed that moving a ship at the speed of light around a black hole (remember, that’s really fast) would cause people on that spaceship to experience half the time of people on Earth and return to Earth years younger than those who remained at home. They’d essentially be traveling through time. However, keep in mind that this method would be lethal: the spaceship would fall apart before being able to rotate that quickly, killing all the passengers inside as well.
Scientists have also acknowledged time machines (that’s right, they don’t just exist in our imaginations, they could be real). There’s a popular understanding among the general public (likely rooting from popular sci-fi movies) that time traveling would need some sort of device. To make this machine work, you’d have to bend space-time so far that it would turn back on itself, forming a loop. A closed and clean time-like curve. However, one way to accomplish this would require negative energy density. What scientists call “exotic matter” that would have bizarre physical properties, the absolute opposite of normal matter. It would move in the opposite direction of normal matter when forces act upon it. For example, to put into perspective what this would look like, if you pushed your water bottle, per negative energy density, it would move back. Crazy huh? This kind of matter could exist, but not enough to create a time machine. Well, there’s another way to create a time machine, without exotic matter. A traveler would revolve inside a doughnut-shaped vacuum where space-time, using gravity, would form a time loop. The more revolutions this person made, the farther back or forward in time they would go. Yet, the gravitational fields would have to be so precise and powerful that it’s basically impossible.
Apart from these basically impossible methods, some scientists say that time travel is impossible as it would be lethal to any human who would undergo it. They wouldn’t be able to survive traveling at the speed of light. They wouldn’t be able to withstand the immense power of gravity. They wouldn’t survive from standing on a star to experience time travel. There’s basically no way.
It’s basically impossible.
Time Travel Has Happened Before, Therefore it is Possible:
Even though modern science tells us that time travel is basically impossible, there have been some that have challenged this fact. Some conspiracy theories tell us that modern science is behind. It’s not seeing reality.
We’ll start off with the modern man. The photo was taken in 1920 in Canada at the grand opening of a bridge. Among dozens of top hats, suits, and shoes, one man stands out. He’s wearing sunglasses, a graphic t-shirt, and a jacket. He also appears to be holding a camera in his hands. It’s shockingly modern.
On February 25 of 2003, another man, Andrew Carlssin, had turned $800 into $350 million in stocks in just two weeks. He made risky investments, yet all of them pulled through. Carlssin’s astonishing, but strange, luck turned the heads of federal investigators at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) who arrested him, presuming that he wasn’t actually lucky and was getting insider information. However, during questioning, investigators got an explanation they weren’t expecting: Carlssin said he traveled back from the year of 2256. He knew which stocks were going to rise and bring him a fortune.
The federals labeled him as a pathological liar. A complete lunatic. Yet, contrary to the federals’ case, they had no record of Carlssin’s existence before December 2002. After being locked up for two months and an anonymous person bailing him with $1 million, Carlssin went off the grid, never to be seen again. The Paranormal Defense Agency presumed that, as per his own confession, that he went back to his time craft and traveled back to his own time.
This next case is a little different. On August 30, 2006, Hakan Nordkvist came home from work to find the kitchen floor flooded by water from, which he presumed, a broken sink pipe. As he entered the sink pipes, he noticed that the space was larger than usual and continued forward to the presumed light at the end of the tunnel. Nordkvist claims that a wormhole that opened under his sink led him to a very different world in which he met himself as a 72-year-old. He couldn’t believe it when his older self told him many things to confirm his identity.
After the supposed incident, Nordkvist posted a video on his blog. One of him and his older self hugging and showing everyone their identical arm tattoos. And after years of this incident happening, scientists have still not been able to find evidence to refute Nordkvist’s claims. As bizarre as it sounds, Nordkvist might not have been lying.
And finally, leading to the most significant and well-known figure in terms of time travel: John Titor. On January 27th of 2001, he took to posting an unusual message on an online forum. Here’s what he said:
“Greetings. I am a time traveler from the year 2036. I am on my way home after getting an IBM 5100 computer system from the year 1975.
My “time” machine is a stationary mass, temporal displacement unit manufactured by General Electric. The unit is powered by two, top-spin, dual-positive singularities that produce a standard, off-set Tipler sinusoid.
I will be happy to post pictures of the unit.”
He described himself as an American soldier from the future, sent to retrieve vital information from an old computer. After publishing this one viral post, Titor took to talking about the superverse in which multiple parallel universes exist. By traveling through various different times and dimensions, he claimed that he would never be able to return to the one he came from. Instead, he claimed that our parallel universe, only 2.5% divergent from his own, was very similar, allowing him to complete his supposed mission.
Titor, claiming to be from the year 2036, informed the public that the government had figured out time travel and had been using it for many years prior. They supposedly sent him to retrieve the IBM 5100 due to his historical knowledge and his promise to his grandfather (someone that worked on the machine) to bring back the computer to his dimension.
Scientists have still not been able to debunk Titor’s argument, as the inconsistencies in his testimonies are most likely to be due to the 2.5% divergence between our and his society. Then again, Titor was willing to reveal as much information about the future including the immense amount of warfare that will plague the world. A civil war and World War III. And in 2020’s entirety, we’ve seen evidence of both.
Neutral Perspective:
To this day, we all know about time travel through various forms of entertainment. Yet, to be able to bring that very element to life is something that would be astonishing. Groundbreaking.
Einstein was thorough in providing us with information detailing how different time travel methods would work. The only limitation would be our lack of developed technology eligible to complete the process while also proving to not be lethal. On the other hand, modern science fails to explain how these supposed time travelers are still alive, even after undergoing this theoretically lethal process.
Scientists don’t have all the information. These supposed time travelers cannot be the foundation of all our time travel knowledge. It’s all a conspiracy.
However, this all succeeds in bringing us to one conclusion. While time travel might not be real in itself, specifically the existence of these time travelers, it could be possible. We do have a base knowledge in science that would be able to benefit our knowledge regarding time travel. It might not be possible now, but it could be possible sooner than we thought.
Our technological revolution was never expected. The speed at which the world adapted to technology was even more unexpected. Therefore, before you know it, you might be venturing through different dimensions, exploring the parallel universes of time.
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