CH 34: Mundane Implications of Time Dilation
If we are to believe the empirical evidence behind Einstein's theories, then it is an accepted fact that time traveling into the future is simply a matter of building a very fast spaceship. For example, if we could build a ship right now that traveled 99.99% of the speed of light (186,263 miles per second in case you are wondering) and then you spent a year on said ship when you returned to earth the rest of the world will have moved an astonishing 70 years into the future from your perspective of only one year. Despite the seemingly inexplicable nature of such a result, it is not science fiction, just science fact. At an incredibly small, indiscernible level, we are all at different points in time.
A timely example is the cosmonaut Andrei Avdeyev, who spent 748 days aboard Mir space station going approximately 17,000 miles per hour. This has propelled him roughly 0.02 seconds (20 milliseconds) into the future. Consider that a fly’s wings need only .002 seconds to flap once. So while it might be this degree of time travel is completely indiscernible in terms of your shared experienced in reality, bona-fide time travel happened nonetheless.
Clearly now, time travel into the future is just building a much faster flying machine than what our current technology is capable of. Time traveling into the past is theoretically about traveling faster than light, in which case you are catching up with time, but this is a much harder problem, since the past has already occurred so that involves retracing steps in sand that already has presumably disappeared. If however, we suspend the incredible difficulties that exist with time traveling into the past, and make the assumption that future society works out the kinks and builds such a machine, it begs a very interesting question: Are there time travelers here right now? Certainly, if a group of humans can build a functioning time machine, presumably they can also create and use technology to render themselves completely invisible to us. The fact is that we cannot rule out this scenario, even if it feels altogether impossible.
Surely not a Time Machine