How To Make a Time Travel

How To Make a Time Travel

            Right now, at this very moment, you are traveling through time. Oh yeah, you’re a time machine. Simply by existing you are traveling through the infinitely stretching arrow of time, one second per second forward. That may seem obvious, but allow me to let you in on another secret. You are a time machine in another way. You are actually slowing time down around you. Before I get into that; however, we should discuss some other ways to travel through time.

            First of all, there’s black holes. These cosmic marvels are so dense and massive, that they actually bend time. Time moving near a black hole is actually half of that here on Earth. So it makes a perfect resource to use in a time machine. Obviously we can’t just pull a black hole over, because even if we managed it the black hole would swallow the Earth before you could bat an eyelash. So we need another way to get there and back. The answer is wormholes, tiny wrinkles in the fabric of the universe. If we can jam one of these open, we could have one end leading just outside of Earth and the other near a black hole, a safe some odd million light years away. Then you get in your space ship and fly through the worm hole and arriving near the black hole on the other side. The trick to not getting sucked in and having your entire ship squished smaller than a pea is to orbit the black hole. If you orbit too slowly you will spiral into the giant absence of light, and if you go too fast you will fling off to the side. If you go at just the right speed you will orbit the black hole in a complicated pattern, but the numbers are a bit tighter than Goldilocks and her porridge. Now that you are moving through time at half the time as everyone else, you finally have the time to practice those Kung Fu moves you’ve been working on, or learn how to speak Spanish, it’s your time to waste. If you orbit the black hole for ten years, then twenty will have passed on Earth. Congratulations, you now know how to time travel. But this isn’t too practical to go ten years into the future. Let’s check out some other possibilities.

            Picture a space ship. Now imagine it a little bigger. No, a little smaller than that. Perfect! That’s a good size for a space ship that can travel close to the speed of light, don’t you think? Oh yeah, that’s the next way to travel in time. It turns out that, as proposed by a goofy looking guy named Einstein that the universe has a cosmic speed limit to it. That would be the speed of light, weighing in at about 671 million MPH. Try doing that on the freeway. Anything that approaches this speed actually shifts the speed at which it travels in time, to ensure that this speed limit isn’t broken. Nature tends to be a bit more dramatic than a speeding ticket. So your space ship is whizzing about at, let’s say 670.9 million MPH. At this speed the time passing inside of your ship is moving much slower than that outside of your ship. You will step on the brakes and arrive in the future. Congratulations once again, you have found two ways to travel in time. I didn’t say that was all though.

            Way number three to travel in time, worm holes. Whoa whoa whoa, didn’t we already use worm holes? Well yeah, but this way is different. A bit better. This is the only theorized way that has theorized evidence, to actually travel backwards in time. Say you managed to wrestle open another worm hole, but this time not through space, through time. Time has to follow the same rules as the other three dimensions of the universe, length, width, and height. That is, it isn’t perfect. Worm holes aren’t just wrinkles in the three special dimensions, but in time as well. If you can open a worm hole that doesn’t lead anywhere else in space, just imagine where it could lead through time. You could go dance with Queen Elizabeth the First, or go have an all-night party in some chrome dance club in the future. You now know three ways to travel in time, you’re like a time travel aficionado. But of course, no time travel speech would be complete without delving into a paradox.

            A man named Steven Hawking created his own adaptation of the grandfather paradox that he calls the mad scientist paradox. In it, a mad scientist manages to rip open a worm hole, a hole through time. He grabs a pistol off of a table and steps into the portal, the world’s first time traveler. Not too impressively, he’s landed himself a whole minute into the past. Though even a minute is enough time to do some major damage. The scientists turns around to see himself, one minute in the past, walking into the room and inspecting the gun he had left on the table before stepping into the worm hole. He lifts his gun, and shoots the person he sees, killing him instantly. So if the scientist was dead, he had never even walked through the portal, never took aim, and never pulled the trigger. But that also means that he never died, giving him the ability to walk through the portal and kill himself, which means he couldn’t have fired the shot, but that means he didn’t die, so he could shoot the shot, yeah I’m done here.

            There can only be one answer. Such a time portal will never exist. I guess that means I lied to you, you only know two ways to travel in time. After close examination we see why this worm hole through time could never exist. To put it simply, particles of air and other things suspended in the air drift into the worm hole, traveling one minute back in time. Then for them the worm hole opens again and they once again go through, this time right next to an identical copy of themselves. And again and again they go, circling through the worm hole millions of times, and their energy moves through with them. Since this is a time machine, you don’t have to factor in the time it takes for the particles to go through over and over. It all happens simultaneously. All of this energy is duplicated infinite times in a single instant, and a massive explosion takes out our entire solar system, maybe even more than that. Eat that evil scientist. Oh wait, we’re dead too. Oh well. I guess time travel to the past is never meant to be.

            Back to that whole, you are a time machine business, because there’s still one more branch of time travel to explore. It turns out that another thing Einstein said was that all massive particles slow down time, dragging on it like a fish moving through water, and when large amounts of massive particles get together the affect becomes more profound. That’s why the black hole slows time down so much, but it also works on smaller scales. The Earth slows time down one third of a billionth of a second. Even the Great Pyramids in Egypt are time machines. It sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, but it’s true. The Great Pyramids slow time by a number so small I’d waste my breath trying to describe it, and for that matter you are time machine by an even smaller number, due to the fact that you have mass. Velocity and energy also have an effect on time. So next time you’re riding in your car on your way to work, don’t forget to admire the fact that you’re driving a time machine.