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Time travel: five ways that we could do it

Cathal O’Connell

Cathal O'Connell is a science writer based in Melbourne.

In 2009 the British physicist Stephen Hawking held a party for time travellers – the twist was he sent out the invites a year later (No guests showed up). Time travel is probably impossible. Even if it were possible, Hawking and others have argued that you could never travel back before the moment your time machine was built.

But travel to the future? That’s a different story.

Of course, we are all time travellers as we are swept along in the current of time, from past to future, at a rate of one hour per hour.

But, as with a river, the current flows at different speeds in different places. Science as we know it allows for several methods to take the fast-track into the future. Here’s a rundown.

1. Time travel via speed

This is the easiest and most practical way to time travel into the far future – go really fast.

According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, when you travel at speeds approaching the speed of light, time slows down for you relative to the outside world.

This is not a just a conjecture or thought experiment – it’s been measured. Using twin atomic clocks (one flown in a jet aircraft, the other stationary on Earth) physicists have shown that a flying clock ticks slower, because of its speed.

In the case of the aircraft, the effect is minuscule. But If you were in a spaceship travelling at 90% of the speed of light, you’d experience time passing about 2.6 times slower than it was back on Earth.

And the closer you get to the speed of light, the more extreme the time-travel.

Computer solves a major time travel problem

The highest speeds achieved through any human technology are probably the protons whizzing around the Large Hadron Collider at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. Using special relativity we can calculate one second for the proton is equivalent to 27,777,778 seconds, or about 11 months , for us.

Amazingly, particle physicists have to take this time dilation into account when they are dealing with particles that decay. In the lab, muon particles typically decay in 2.2 microseconds. But fast moving muons, such as those created when cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere, take 10 times longer to disintegrate.

2. Time travel via gravity

The next method of time travel is also inspired by Einstein. According to his theory of general relativity, the stronger the gravity you feel, the slower time moves.

As you get closer to the centre of the Earth, for example, the strength of gravity increases. Time runs slower for your feet than your head.

Again, this effect has been measured. In 2010, physicists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) placed two atomic clocks on shelves, one 33 centimetres above the other, and measured the difference in their rate of ticking. The lower one ticked slower because it feels a slightly stronger gravity.

To travel to the far future, all we need is a region of extremely strong gravity, such as a black hole. The closer you get to the event horizon, the slower time moves – but it’s risky business, cross the boundary and you can never escape.

And anyway, the effect is not that strong so it’s probably not worth the trip.

Assuming you had the technology to travel the vast distances to reach a black hole (the nearest is about 3,000 light years away), the time dilation through travelling would be far greater than any time dilation through orbiting the black hole itself.

(The situation described in the movie Interstellar , where one hour on a planet near a black hole is the equivalent of seven years back on Earth, is so extreme as to be impossible in our Universe, according to Kip Thorne, the movie’s scientific advisor.)

The most mindblowing thing, perhaps, is that GPS systems have to account for time dilation effects (due to both the speed of the satellites and gravity they feel) in order to work. Without these corrections, your phones GPS capability wouldn’t be able to pinpoint your location on Earth to within even a few kilometres.

3. Time travel via suspended animation

Another way to time travel to the future may be to slow your perception of time by slowing down, or stopping, your bodily processes and then restarting them later.

Bacterial spores can live for millions of years in a state of suspended animation, until the right conditions of temperature, moisture, food kick start their metabolisms again. Some mammals, such as bears and squirrels, can slow down their metabolism during hibernation, dramatically reducing their cells’ requirement for food and oxygen.

Could humans ever do the same?

Though completely stopping your metabolism is probably far beyond our current technology, some scientists are working towards achieving inducing a short-term hibernation state lasting at least a few hours. This might be just enough time to get a person through a medical emergency, such as a cardiac arrest, before they can reach the hospital.

In 2005, American scientists demonstrated a way to slow the metabolism of mice (which do not hibernate) by exposing them to minute doses of hydrogen sulphide, which binds to the same cell receptors as oxygen. The core body temperature of the mice dropped to 13 °C and metabolism decreased 10-fold. After six hours the mice could be reanimated without ill effects.

Unfortunately, similar experiments on sheep and pigs were not successful, suggesting the method might not work for larger animals.

Another method, which induces a hypothermic hibernation by replacing the blood with a cold saline solution, has worked on pigs and is currently undergoing human clinical trials in Pittsburgh.

4. Time travel via wormholes

General relativity also allows for the possibility for shortcuts through spacetime, known as wormholes, which might be able to bridge distances of a billion light years or more, or different points in time.

Many physicists, including Stephen Hawking, believe wormholes are constantly popping in and out of existence at the quantum scale, far smaller than atoms. The trick would be to capture one, and inflate it to human scales – a feat that would require a huge amount of energy, but which might just be possible, in theory.

Attempts to prove this either way have failed, ultimately because of the incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics.

5. Time travel using light

Another time travel idea, put forward by the American physicist Ron Mallet, is to use a rotating cylinder of light to twist spacetime. Anything dropped inside the swirling cylinder could theoretically be dragged around in space and in time, in a similar way to how a bubble runs around on top your coffee after you swirl it with a spoon.

According to Mallet, the right geometry could lead to time travel into either the past and the future.

Since publishing his theory in 2000, Mallet has been trying to raise the funds to pay for a proof of concept experiment, which involves dropping neutrons through a circular arrangement of spinning lasers.

His ideas have not grabbed the rest of the physics community however, with others arguing that one of the assumptions of his basic model is plagued by a singularity, which is physics-speak for “it’s impossible”.

The Royal Institution of Australia has an Education resource based on this article. You can access it here .

Related Reading: Computer solves a major time travel problem

Originally published by Cosmos as Time travel: five ways that we could do it

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May 14, 2020

Time travel into the future is totally possible

by Paul M. Sutter, Universe Today

Believe it or not, time travel is possible.

In fact, you're doing it right now. Every single second of every single day, you are advancing into your own future. You are literally moving through time, the same way you would move through space. It may seem pedantic, but it's a very important point. Movement through time is still movement, and you are reaching your own future (whether you like it or not).

And what's even cooler is that you can skip forward in time if you feel like it.

Well, let me be clear, you need to do a little bit of engineering first.

We know through the physics of Einstein's special theory of relativity that you can trade motion in space for motion in time. If you're standing perfectly still, you're moving through the dimension of time at a particular speed (the speed of light , for those of you who are curious). As soon as you start moving through space, however, you slow down your rate of moving through time.

In other words, the faster you move in space , the slower you move in time.

This means that moving objects, like a clock on a rocket, run a little bit slow. One second for someone in a moving spaceship lasts a little bit longer than a second for someone staying still.

The trick is that in order for this to have any sort of noticeable impact, you have to get close to the speed of light, which is really hard to do—to give you some perspective, astronauts that orbit the Earth at tens of thousands of miles per hour are off by only a microsecond or so from our clocks on the ground.

Our fastest human spacecraft don't even crack a tenth of a percent of the speed of light. But if you could somehow spend a good amount of time hugging close to that ultimate speed limit in the universe, the slower your clock will run. You will travel through time into the future. Nothing will feel different for you, but after a couple of years' journey you would return to the Earth to find our clocks advanced by thousands or even tens of thousands of years, depending on how fast you go.

So the future is yours, and you get to choose how quickly you reach it.

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Is Time Travel Possible?

We all travel in time! We travel one year in time between birthdays, for example. And we are all traveling in time at approximately the same speed: 1 second per second.

We typically experience time at one second per second. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's space telescopes also give us a way to look back in time. Telescopes help us see stars and galaxies that are very far away . It takes a long time for the light from faraway galaxies to reach us. So, when we look into the sky with a telescope, we are seeing what those stars and galaxies looked like a very long time ago.

However, when we think of the phrase "time travel," we are usually thinking of traveling faster than 1 second per second. That kind of time travel sounds like something you'd only see in movies or science fiction books. Could it be real? Science says yes!

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows galaxies that are very far away as they existed a very long time ago. Credit: NASA, ESA and R. Thompson (Univ. Arizona)

How do we know that time travel is possible?

More than 100 years ago, a famous scientist named Albert Einstein came up with an idea about how time works. He called it relativity. This theory says that time and space are linked together. Einstein also said our universe has a speed limit: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

Einstein's theory of relativity says that space and time are linked together. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

What does this mean for time travel? Well, according to this theory, the faster you travel, the slower you experience time. Scientists have done some experiments to show that this is true.

For example, there was an experiment that used two clocks set to the exact same time. One clock stayed on Earth, while the other flew in an airplane (going in the same direction Earth rotates).

After the airplane flew around the world, scientists compared the two clocks. The clock on the fast-moving airplane was slightly behind the clock on the ground. So, the clock on the airplane was traveling slightly slower in time than 1 second per second.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Can we use time travel in everyday life?

We can't use a time machine to travel hundreds of years into the past or future. That kind of time travel only happens in books and movies. But the math of time travel does affect the things we use every day.

For example, we use GPS satellites to help us figure out how to get to new places. (Check out our video about how GPS satellites work .) NASA scientists also use a high-accuracy version of GPS to keep track of where satellites are in space. But did you know that GPS relies on time-travel calculations to help you get around town?

GPS satellites orbit around Earth very quickly at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. This slows down GPS satellite clocks by a small fraction of a second (similar to the airplane example above).

GPS satellites orbit around Earth at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. Credit: GPS.gov

However, the satellites are also orbiting Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 km) above the surface. This actually speeds up GPS satellite clocks by a slighter larger fraction of a second.

Here's how: Einstein's theory also says that gravity curves space and time, causing the passage of time to slow down. High up where the satellites orbit, Earth's gravity is much weaker. This causes the clocks on GPS satellites to run faster than clocks on the ground.

The combined result is that the clocks on GPS satellites experience time at a rate slightly faster than 1 second per second. Luckily, scientists can use math to correct these differences in time.

If scientists didn't correct the GPS clocks, there would be big problems. GPS satellites wouldn't be able to correctly calculate their position or yours. The errors would add up to a few miles each day, which is a big deal. GPS maps might think your home is nowhere near where it actually is!

In Summary:

Yes, time travel is indeed a real thing. But it's not quite what you've probably seen in the movies. Under certain conditions, it is possible to experience time passing at a different rate than 1 second per second. And there are important reasons why we need to understand this real-world form of time travel.

If you liked this, you may like:

Is time travel possible? Why one scientist says we 'cannot ignore the possibility.'

A common theme in science-fiction media , time travel is captivating. It’s defined by the late philosopher David Lewis in his essay “The Paradoxes of Time Travel” as “[involving] a discrepancy between time and space time. Any traveler departs and then arrives at his destination; the time elapsed from departure to arrival … is the duration of the journey.”

Time travel is usually understood by most as going back to a bygone era or jumping forward to a point far in the future . But how much of the idea is based in reality? Is it possible to travel through time? 

Is time travel possible?

According to NASA, time travel is possible , just not in the way you might expect. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity says time and motion are relative to each other, and nothing can go faster than the speed of light , which is 186,000 miles per second. Time travel happens through what’s called “time dilation.”

Time dilation , according to Live Science, is how one’s perception of time is different to another's, depending on their motion or where they are. Hence, time being relative. 

Learn more: Best travel insurance

Dr. Ana Alonso-Serrano, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, explained the possibility of time travel and how researchers test theories. 

Space and time are not absolute values, Alonso-Serrano said. And what makes this all more complex is that you are able to carve space-time .

“In the moment that you carve the space-time, you can play with that curvature to make the time come in a circle and make a time machine,” Alonso-Serrano told USA TODAY. 

She explained how, theoretically, time travel is possible. The mathematics behind creating curvature of space-time are solid, but trying to re-create the strict physical conditions needed to prove these theories can be challenging. 

“The tricky point of that is if you can find a physical, realistic, way to do it,” she said. 

Alonso-Serrano said wormholes and warp drives are tools that are used to create this curvature. The matter needed to achieve curving space-time via a wormhole is exotic matter , which hasn’t been done successfully. Researchers don’t even know if this type of matter exists, she said.

“It's something that we work on because it's theoretically possible, and because it's a very nice way to test our theory, to look for possible paradoxes,” Alonso-Serrano added.

“I could not say that nothing is possible, but I cannot ignore the possibility,” she said. 

She also mentioned the anecdote of  Stephen Hawking’s Champagne party for time travelers . Hawking had a GPS-specific location for the party. He didn’t send out invites until the party had already happened, so only people who could travel to the past would be able to attend. No one showed up, and Hawking referred to this event as "experimental evidence" that time travel wasn't possible.

What did Albert Einstein invent?: Discoveries that changed the world

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USA TODAY is exploring the questions you and others ask every day. From "How to watch the Marvel movies in order" to "Why is Pluto not a planet?" to "What to do if your dog eats weed?" – we're striving to find answers to the most common questions you ask every day. Head to our Just Curious section to see what else we can answer for you. 

A beginner's guide to time travel

Learn exactly how Einstein's theory of relativity works, and discover how there's nothing in science that says time travel is impossible.

Everyone can travel in time . You do it whether you want to or not, at a steady rate of one second per second. You may think there's no similarity to traveling in one of the three spatial dimensions at, say, one foot per second. But according to Einstein 's theory of relativity , we live in a four-dimensional continuum — space-time — in which space and time are interchangeable.

Einstein found that the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time — you age more slowly, in other words. One of the key ideas in relativity is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — about 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second), or one light-year per year). But you can get very close to it. If a spaceship were to fly at 99% of the speed of light, you'd see it travel a light-year of distance in just over a year of time. 

That's obvious enough, but now comes the weird part. For astronauts onboard that spaceship, the journey would take a mere seven weeks. It's a consequence of relativity called time dilation , and in effect, it means the astronauts have jumped about 10 months into the future. 

Traveling at high speed isn't the only way to produce time dilation. Einstein showed that gravitational fields produce a similar effect — even the relatively weak field here on the surface of Earth . We don't notice it, because we spend all our lives here, but more than 12,400 miles (20,000 kilometers) higher up gravity is measurably weaker— and time passes more quickly, by about 45 microseconds per day. That's more significant than you might think, because it's the altitude at which GPS satellites orbit Earth, and their clocks need to be precisely synchronized with ground-based ones for the system to work properly. 

The satellites have to compensate for time dilation effects due both to their higher altitude and their faster speed. So whenever you use the GPS feature on your smartphone or your car's satnav, there's a tiny element of time travel involved. You and the satellites are traveling into the future at very slightly different rates.

But for more dramatic effects, we need to look at much stronger gravitational fields, such as those around black holes , which can distort space-time so much that it folds back on itself. The result is a so-called wormhole, a concept that's familiar from sci-fi movies, but actually originates in Einstein's theory of relativity. In effect, a wormhole is a shortcut from one point in space-time to another. You enter one black hole, and emerge from another one somewhere else. Unfortunately, it's not as practical a means of transport as Hollywood makes it look. That's because the black hole's gravity would tear you to pieces as you approached it, but it really is possible in theory. And because we're talking about space-time, not just space, the wormhole's exit could be at an earlier time than its entrance; that means you would end up in the past rather than the future.

Trajectories in space-time that loop back into the past are given the technical name "closed timelike curves." If you search through serious academic journals, you'll find plenty of references to them — far more than you'll find to "time travel." But in effect, that's exactly what closed timelike curves are all about — time travel

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There's another way to produce a closed timelike curve that doesn't involve anything quite so exotic as a black hole or wormhole: You just need a simple rotating cylinder made of super-dense material. This so-called Tipler cylinder is the closest that real-world physics can get to an actual, genuine time machine. But it will likely never be built in the real world, so like a wormhole, it's more of an academic curiosity than a viable engineering design.

Yet as far-fetched as these things are in practical terms, there's no fundamental scientific reason — that we currently know of — that says they are impossible. That's a thought-provoking situation, because as the physicist Michio Kaku is fond of saying, "Everything not forbidden is compulsory" (borrowed from T.H. White's novel, "The Once And Future King"). He doesn't mean time travel has to happen everywhere all the time, but Kaku is suggesting that the universe is so vast it ought to happen somewhere at least occasionally. Maybe some super-advanced civilization in another galaxy knows how to build a working time machine, or perhaps closed timelike curves can even occur naturally under certain rare conditions.

This raises problems of a different kind — not in science or engineering, but in basic logic. If time travel is allowed by the laws of physics, then it's possible to envision a whole range of paradoxical scenarios . Some of these appear so illogical that it's difficult to imagine that they could ever occur. But if they can't, what's stopping them? 

Thoughts like these prompted Stephen Hawking , who was always skeptical about the idea of time travel into the past, to come up with his "chronology protection conjecture" — the notion that some as-yet-unknown law of physics prevents closed timelike curves from happening. But that conjecture is only an educated guess, and until it is supported by hard evidence, we can come to only one conclusion: Time travel is possible.

A party for time travelers 

Hawking was skeptical about the feasibility of time travel into the past, not because he had disproved it, but because he was bothered by the logical paradoxes it created. In his chronology protection conjecture, he surmised that physicists would eventually discover a flaw in the theory of closed timelike curves that made them impossible. 

In 2009, he came up with an amusing way to test this conjecture. Hawking held a champagne party (shown in his Discovery Channel program), but he only advertised it after it had happened. His reasoning was that, if time machines eventually become practical, someone in the future might read about the party and travel back to attend it. But no one did — Hawking sat through the whole evening on his own. This doesn't prove time travel is impossible, but it does suggest that it never becomes a commonplace occurrence here on Earth.

The arrow of time 

One of the distinctive things about time is that it has a direction — from past to future. A cup of hot coffee left at room temperature always cools down; it never heats up. Your cellphone loses battery charge when you use it; it never gains charge. These are examples of entropy , essentially a measure of the amount of "useless" as opposed to "useful" energy. The entropy of a closed system always increases, and it's the key factor determining the arrow of time.

It turns out that entropy is the only thing that makes a distinction between past and future. In other branches of physics, like relativity or quantum theory, time doesn't have a preferred direction. No one knows where time's arrow comes from. It may be that it only applies to large, complex systems, in which case subatomic particles may not experience the arrow of time.

Time travel paradox 

If it's possible to travel back into the past — even theoretically — it raises a number of brain-twisting paradoxes — such as the grandfather paradox — that even scientists and philosophers find extremely perplexing.

Killing Hitler

A time traveler might decide to go back and kill him in his infancy. If they succeeded, future history books wouldn't even mention Hitler — so what motivation would the time traveler have for going back in time and killing him?

Killing your grandfather

Instead of killing a young Hitler, you might, by accident, kill one of your own ancestors when they were very young. But then you would never be born, so you couldn't travel back in time to kill them, so you would be born after all, and so on … 

A closed loop

Suppose the plans for a time machine suddenly appear from thin air on your desk. You spend a few days building it, then use it to send the plans back to your earlier self. But where did those plans originate? Nowhere — they are just looping round and round in time.

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Paradox-Free Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible, Researchers Say

Matthew S. Schwartz

A dog dressed as Marty McFly from Back to the Future attends the Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade in 2015. New research says time travel might be possible without the problems McFly encountered. Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A dog dressed as Marty McFly from Back to the Future attends the Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade in 2015. New research says time travel might be possible without the problems McFly encountered.

"The past is obdurate," Stephen King wrote in his book about a man who goes back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination. "It doesn't want to be changed."

Turns out, King might have been on to something.

Countless science fiction tales have explored the paradox of what would happen if you went back in time and did something in the past that endangered the future. Perhaps one of the most famous pop culture examples is in Back to the Future , when Marty McFly goes back in time and accidentally stops his parents from meeting, putting his own existence in jeopardy.

But maybe McFly wasn't in much danger after all. According a new paper from researchers at the University of Queensland, even if time travel were possible, the paradox couldn't actually exist.

Researchers ran the numbers and determined that even if you made a change in the past, the timeline would essentially self-correct, ensuring that whatever happened to send you back in time would still happen.

"Say you traveled in time in an attempt to stop COVID-19's patient zero from being exposed to the virus," University of Queensland scientist Fabio Costa told the university's news service .

"However, if you stopped that individual from becoming infected, that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place," said Costa, who co-authored the paper with honors undergraduate student Germain Tobar.

"This is a paradox — an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our universe."

A variation is known as the "grandfather paradox" — in which a time traveler kills their own grandfather, in the process preventing the time traveler's birth.

The logical paradox has given researchers a headache, in part because according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, "closed timelike curves" are possible, theoretically allowing an observer to travel back in time and interact with their past self — potentially endangering their own existence.

But these researchers say that such a paradox wouldn't necessarily exist, because events would adjust themselves.

Take the coronavirus patient zero example. "You might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so, you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would," Tobar told the university's news service.

In other words, a time traveler could make changes, but the original outcome would still find a way to happen — maybe not the same way it happened in the first timeline but close enough so that the time traveler would still exist and would still be motivated to go back in time.

"No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you," Tobar said.

The paper, "Reversible dynamics with closed time-like curves and freedom of choice," was published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity . The findings seem consistent with another time travel study published this summer in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters. That study found that changes made in the past won't drastically alter the future.

Bestselling science fiction author Blake Crouch, who has written extensively about time travel, said the new study seems to support what certain time travel tropes have posited all along.

"The universe is deterministic and attempts to alter Past Event X are destined to be the forces which bring Past Event X into being," Crouch told NPR via email. "So the future can affect the past. Or maybe time is just an illusion. But I guess it's cool that the math checks out."

• grandfather paradox
• time travel

Can we time travel? A theoretical physicist provides some answers

Emeritus professor, Physics, Carleton University

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Time travel makes regular appearances in popular culture, with innumerable time travel storylines in movies, television and literature. But it is a surprisingly old idea: one can argue that the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex , written by Sophocles over 2,500 years ago, is the first time travel story .

But is time travel in fact possible? Given the popularity of the concept, this is a legitimate question. As a theoretical physicist, I find that there are several possible answers to this question, not all of which are contradictory.

The simplest answer is that time travel cannot be possible because if it was, we would already be doing it. One can argue that it is forbidden by the laws of physics, like the second law of thermodynamics or relativity . There are also technical challenges: it might be possible but would involve vast amounts of energy.

There is also the matter of time-travel paradoxes; we can — hypothetically — resolve these if free will is an illusion, if many worlds exist or if the past can only be witnessed but not experienced. Perhaps time travel is impossible simply because time must flow in a linear manner and we have no control over it, or perhaps time is an illusion and time travel is irrelevant.

Laws of physics

Since Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity — which describes the nature of time, space and gravity — is our most profound theory of time, we would like to think that time travel is forbidden by relativity. Unfortunately, one of his colleagues from the Institute for Advanced Study, Kurt Gödel, invented a universe in which time travel was not just possible, but the past and future were inextricably tangled.

We can actually design time machines , but most of these (in principle) successful proposals require negative energy , or negative mass, which does not seem to exist in our universe. If you drop a tennis ball of negative mass, it will fall upwards. This argument is rather unsatisfactory, since it explains why we cannot time travel in practice only by involving another idea — that of negative energy or mass — that we do not really understand.

Mathematical physicist Frank Tipler conceptualized a time machine that does not involve negative mass, but requires more energy than exists in the universe .

Time travel also violates the second law of thermodynamics , which states that entropy or randomness must always increase. Time can only move in one direction — in other words, you cannot unscramble an egg. More specifically, by travelling into the past we are going from now (a high entropy state) into the past, which must have lower entropy.

This argument originated with the English cosmologist Arthur Eddington , and is at best incomplete. Perhaps it stops you travelling into the past, but it says nothing about time travel into the future. In practice, it is just as hard for me to travel to next Thursday as it is to travel to last Thursday.

Resolving paradoxes

There is no doubt that if we could time travel freely, we run into the paradoxes. The best known is the “ grandfather paradox ”: one could hypothetically use a time machine to travel to the past and murder their grandfather before their father’s conception, thereby eliminating the possibility of their own birth. Logically, you cannot both exist and not exist.

Read more: Time travel could be possible, but only with parallel timelines

Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five , published in 1969, describes how to evade the grandfather paradox. If free will simply does not exist, it is not possible to kill one’s grandfather in the past, since he was not killed in the past. The novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, can only travel to other points on his world line (the timeline he exists in), but not to any other point in space-time, so he could not even contemplate killing his grandfather.

The universe in Slaughterhouse-Five is consistent with everything we know. The second law of thermodynamics works perfectly well within it and there is no conflict with relativity. But it is inconsistent with some things we believe in, like free will — you can observe the past, like watching a movie, but you cannot interfere with the actions of people in it.

Could we allow for actual modifications of the past, so that we could go back and murder our grandfather — or Hitler ? There are several multiverse theories that suppose that there are many timelines for different universes. This is also an old idea: in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol , Ebeneezer Scrooge experiences two alternative timelines, one of which leads to a shameful death and the other to happiness.

Time is a river

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote that:

“ Time is like a river made up of the events which happen , and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.”

We can imagine that time does flow past every point in the universe, like a river around a rock. But it is difficult to make the idea precise. A flow is a rate of change — the flow of a river is the amount of water that passes a specific length in a given time. Hence if time is a flow, it is at the rate of one second per second, which is not a very useful insight.

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that a “ chronology protection conjecture ” must exist, an as-yet-unknown physical principle that forbids time travel. Hawking’s concept originates from the idea that we cannot know what goes on inside a black hole, because we cannot get information out of it. But this argument is redundant: we cannot time travel because we cannot time travel!

Researchers are investigating a more fundamental theory, where time and space “emerge” from something else. This is referred to as quantum gravity , but unfortunately it does not exist yet.

So is time travel possible? Probably not, but we don’t know for sure!

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Time travel is possible, but it’s a one-way ticket

Chenoa van den Boogaard , Physics and Astronomy editor

The ability to travel through time, whether it is to fix a mistake in the past or gain insight into the future, has long been embraced by science fiction and debated by theoretical physicists. While the debate continues over whether travelling into the past is possible, physicists have determined that travelling to the future most certainly is. And you don’t need a wormhole or a DeLorean to do it.

Real-life time travel occurs through time dilation, a property of Einstein’s special relativity . Einstein was the first to realize that time is not constant, as previously believed, but instead slows down as you move faster through space.

As part of his theory, Einstein re-envisioned space itself. He coined the phrase “spacetime,” fusing the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time into a single term. Instead of treating space as a flat and rigid place that holds all the objects in the universe, Einstein thought of it as curved and malleable, able to form gravitational dips around masses that pull other objects in, just as a bowling ball placed in the centre of a trampoline would cause any smaller object placed on the trampoline to slide towards the centre.

A computer-generated representation of Einstein’s curved spacetime. The Earth creates a gravitational dip in the fabric of spacetime which is deepest at its core. Courtesy and © of NASA

The closer an object gets to the centre of the dip, the faster it accelerates. The centre of the Earth’s gravitational dip is located at the Earth’s core, where gravitational acceleration is strongest. According to Einstein’s theory, because time moves more slowly as you move faster through space, the closer an object is to the centre of the Earth, the slower time moves for that object.

This effect can be seen in GPS satellites, which orbit 20,200 kilometres above the Earth’s surface. These satellites have highly precise clocks onboard that gain an average of 38 microseconds per day due to time dilation. While this time gain seems insignificant, GPS satellites rely on their onboard clocks to maintain precise global positioning. Running 38 microseconds fast would result in a positioning error of nearly 10 kilometres, an error that would increase daily if the time difference were not constantly corrected.

A more dramatic example of time dilation can be seen in the movie Interstellar when Matthew McConaughey and his crew land on a planet with an extreme gravitational field caused by a nearby black hole. Because of the black hole’s intense gravitational influence, time slows dramatically for the crew on the planet, making one hour on the surface equal to seven years on Earth. This is why, when the crew returns to Earth, Matthew McConaughey’s daughter is an old woman while he appears to be the same age as when he left.

So why hasn’t humanity succeeded in making such drastic leaps forward in time? The answer to this question comes down to velocity. In order for humanity to send a traveller years into the future, we would either have to take advantage of the intense gravitational acceleration caused by black holes or send the traveller rocketing into space at close to the speed of light (about 1 billion km/h). With our current technology , jumping a few microseconds into the future is all humans can manage.

But if technology one day allows us to send a human into the future by travelling close to the speed of light, would there be any way for the traveller to use time dilation to return to the past and report her findings? “Interstellar travel reaching close to the speed of light might be possible,” says Dr. Jaymie Matthews , professor of astrophysics at the University of British Columbia, “[but] this voyage is one way into the future, not back to the past.”

If we can’t use time dilation to return to the past, does this mean that the past is forever inaccessible? Perhaps not. Einstein proposed that time travel into the past could be achieved through an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a type of wormhole. Wormholes are theoretical areas of spacetime that are warped in a way that connects two distant points in space.

A visualization of a wormhole: The fabric of spacetime curves back upon itself, forming a bridge between two distant locations. Image by Panzi , CC-BY 3.0

Einstein’s equations suggested that this bridge in space could hypothetically connect two points in time instead if it were stable enough. “At the moment, even an Einstein-Rosen bridge cannot [be used to] go back in the past because it doesn’t live long enough – it is not stable,” Matthews explains.

“Even if it was stable, it [requires] other physics, which we don’t have. Hypothetical particles and states of matter that have “exotic” physical properties that would violate known laws of physics, such as a particle having a negative mass. That is why “wormholes” are only science fiction.”

While it would be fascinating to travel back in time to see the dinosaurs or to meet Albert Einstein and show him the reality of time travel, perhaps it is best if the past remains untouched. Travelling to the past invites the possibility of making an alteration that could destroy the future. For example, in Back to the Future , Marty McFly travels to the past and inadvertently prevents his parents from meeting each other, nearly preventing his own existence. But if he had undone his own existence, how could he have travelled back in time in the first place?

Marty’s adventures are a variation of the grandfather paradox: what happens if you go back in time and kill your grandfather before your father is conceived? If you are successful, how is it possible that you’re alive to kill your grandfather in the first place?

A recent study at the University of Queensland may have the answer to this baffling paradox. In this study, the researchers prove mathematically that paradox-free time travel is possible, showing that the universe will self-correct to avoid inconsistencies. If this is true, then even if we could travel back in time, we would never be able to alter events to create a different future.

While these new findings are enlightening, there appears to be more evidence that, although time dilation can allow us to glimpse the future, we will never be able to visit the past. As the late Stephen Hawking said in his book Black Holes and Baby Universes , “The best evidence we have that time travel [into the past] is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.”

Banner image by Alex Lehner, CC BY 2.0

240 thoughts on “ Time travel is possible, but it’s a one-way ticket ”

How do I go about time travel? what do I need how do I get those required things?

Very large ring magnets and some mathematics and will to see it in reality.

How about a sphere magnet ship…

hoe about 3d time and hemi synch or portals augmented reality,power of suggestion..drugs pcp binural tones frequency amplitude .virtual computing ie.

I’m a time traveling tourist, Stephen Hawking was wrong.

Time is simply a measurement of space under the amount given its mass and the amount of light and dark in which governs its mass in a 4dimensional reality step outside of the force in which permenates its flow one would reside there would be no past present or future there be a fixed permance of a constant here and now and so ok then what is to come.

Very well explained article !!

But I think if physics says time travel can be possible then it’s definitely possible. Considering not to go back to your childhood and fix things but rather can go to the past but as invisible person to them. So that,

No actions by you would impact your future.

Regards, Kirankumar DR

Tell me more

Yes.. I wish I can do this too 🙂

We will understand it better, by and by…

I have a theory for warp speed, but nasa would have to put it to the test…check my Facebook

I am reading for this drive , i am ready , without think my life safe or not

@Ravi chandila English translation please?

Please someone help me I just want to send a message to myself in my past.,to get the love of my life, he never revealed to me his feelings now my life is ruined by the decision of my elders Please help me, it’s question of my life and death. Nazneen

Is time travel machine is their, if the time travel machine is true can it move to the past . To bring back my lost life

That’s the problem you know.. it is not there that’s why we aren’t able to travel time..and yes it it will be built then you will be able to do so…..

damn my life is also lost and broken but still no one can give a time machine for free

DO NOT change the future. That’s why people like you couldn’t go. One wrong person to ruin it for the rest of us

On the point of time reversal, it is evidently impossible. The Uncertainty Principle prohibits spacetime reversal. The Universe is unable to remember its past (as a consequence of the Uncertainty Principle), therefore the Universe cannot reorganise itself.

Can I have to go on my past with another time travel it is a possible when just tell me about one thing that can I have to go in my past one year

we dont need magnets.we need a strong gravitational force to warp spacetime allowing us to travel through with speed of sound or speed of light or faster.we need to learn how to control such force carefully or it could be lethal.gravity slows down time.but it can theoratically work both ways.if we can reverse the gravity’s natural reaction we could speed up a spacecraft faster than light(its all relative(and theoratical))

I WAS ACTUALLY JUST THINKING THE SAME THINFG BEFORE READING YOUR PIECE. VERY WELL EXPLAINED, AND IT DOES MAKE ALOT OF SENSE. WELL DONE.

oh and I forgot to add it can be the key to look into the universe and also travelling time(theoratical).speed and gravity are the key to the universe(theory not proved)

All you really need is a crystal diode with 16 sides, a large pain of glass, and a frequency transmitter near a bathtub full of ice cold water….if you reach the right frequency you can travel through time forward and reverse…

Magnetized metal(VCR Reading Head), to read time out of the Magnetosphere all around earth. The Magnetosphere kills 2 birds with one stone- it protects earth and it records human time:

Mystery solved and I will explain, I was in a coma 3 months and I experienced things, I traveled time forward and backward, it is not a one way ticket. Movies and songs are recorded on magnetic tape in a VCR tape Cartridge or Cassette tape,   Magnetic tape recording works by converting electrical signals into magnetic energy, which imprints a record of the signal onto a moving tape covered in magnetic particles.   3D life on earth(a movie), and the Magnetosphere all around earth coming from the core of earth(MAGNETIC ACTIVITY) without Atom Made Tape, is like a movie on magnetic Atom made tape in a VCR tape cartridge. Revolution and Rotation is the motor(VCR).

This is why people have those freaky Deji’vu feelings like they have lived this before, BECAUSE YOU HAVE, and how people can be psychic, and how there is Prophecy in the Bible. When a person dies, their Spirit- MIND(Thoughts, Feelings, Urges(Physical and mental personality)) breaks out of human body- a stopped heart is what releases the spirit from the human body. Then the Soul(Life) with the memory of your existence in it breaks out of spirit and goes back to your birthday with a erased memory, meanwhile your spirit goes back in time to when you were a teenager starting the mental puberty, maturity from that adult spirit you died with in last life.In that old movie Star Wars or maybe it was the Empire Strikes Back, there is a scene where Princess Laya plays like a 3D movie, that is EXACTLY how its of life on earth.

Mr Snow, I believe you as I have seen it too. As humans we have deep knowledge of things we cannot rationally explain but you have done a great job here.

I thought that Analogy would be a better and easier way to explain, or in a picture of the earth from far out in space with the atmosphere around it looks like a DVD disk and the earth being the center sticker but is in 3D.

Actually you are on to several things here. I have also had the infusion of knowledge that also had to do with comparing life to recorded movies and music. I know you were using it to explain your theory, but I do think there is something there, I always have. When you watch a movie you are seeing the past. Why can’t you somehow use a recording as a base to go back into? I agree with everything you said here, and it’s worth looking into.

Jeffrey, very interesting idea!! Could be something to that. As far as your coma experiences, I think there are things we just do not understand and are nearly impossible to explain. Perhaps time IS like a video tape, or a DVD? Magnetism is one of the forces of nature. I too have had some odd experiences that suggest that we are able to perceive things beyond our five known senses.

I think if you have had a near death experience, such as being in a coma, then you have experienced the powerful hallucinations provided by the chemical substance DMT which your body creates naturally in times of extreme trauma, but also found in most plants and used recreationally by some who are brave enough and into that kind of thing. Your theory is interesting, but completely unproven and as far as I know untested. If things were so simple, I’m sure many scientists would have already thought of such an idea and tested it.

How do I travel through time

Be alive and live life to the fullest is the best way to travel through time ! OR Befriend grey aliens../ They may hold the key to the sum of all knowledge in the universe..

Sounds good will it work

Really log vaps mil sakte hau h kya

Can you plz explain I didn’t get it

You dont first all you are not experienced in the field of the space time continum and you could you upset the already fragile and multitude of alternate realitys that have looping due irresponsible ones who somehow gotten the technology causing another altered time frame there are a disarray multiple reality which are looping in earths 4dimensonal time frame time traveling is not for a vacation or just to get a joy ride its a serious and complex reality not be joked about it is a real thing and certain individual have are upset the balance of earths original time zone note now the gaurdians of this region of milky way the galatic order of the light keepers Angelic gaurdians of the (names with held)are working over time ooh nice pun (over TIME) ha wow to restore Earth back to a original time continum

Who said I want a joy ride, my life is devastated even my kids are suffering, I want to commit suicide but can’t leave my kids back, Being captive for most of my life, if my life is changed nothing will be disturbed, only thing happens is 3 life’s will be saved. And more so over I don’t want to travel I just want to send a message to myself in my past plz on the date of 30th May 1996. My life is ruined plz help me, it was my dad,brother, sister who pushed me into the dungeon and my husband and his family took over the charge of torturing me. Nazneen

I want to go back in time and tell my 5 year old self to burn the creepy dolls that my mom bought cause there is demons in it at the same time I will kidnap and torture my dad right now go back in time and show the younger version of my dad show him what will happen to his future self if he don’t get rid of those possessed objects and keeps letting my mom buy those antiques I’m 18 now I’m single no girlfriend no friend alone nothing very depressed too and I try to remember the positive things that happened in my life which there aren’t many tho but the demons keep squeezing my memory brain and my mom keeps on making so much loud noise including her damn mouth I have attempted to burn the demonic dolls but I only burned them for a minute or two with gas cause I was worried I might accidentally set my whole neighborhood on fire but then my mom threw it all in the recycle instead of the trash so the demons just keep bothering me its driving me nuts he he.

Access to a Quantum Computer Network on the web would be a good start. A series of ChatBots and webhook sites strategically placed in not only space, but in time. A series of algorithms and I think information can be transferred backwards to ones self…

How do we know that there are no horde of tourists among ourselves?

How do we know we’re all not tourists?

We’re all time travelers. We all travel into the future daily. 1 second at a time. Lol…

Agreed! I had the same thought!

Excellent question

If is possible, I would like to go back to: January the 1st 1975 & relive the 70’s as I prefer that decade to the awful one I am facing now, Back then We had more police our streets & left our front doors open, Those days were far much more better .

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Please do comment on my blog post regarding time travel

how about you ask the flash to help you

I need the time travel so I’m fails so many times i love time travel i have to go fast and future so i have no idea im travel is a my dream so my dream solution plz say me i have time travel so please help me someone please…..

I think you are over reacting

When we look at the stars now it is what they looked like years ago so what if we go to the stars and look down?

You cant go to the stars. It will just take billions and billions of years to go even to the next nearest star than our Sun- proxima centuri. Sorry to say, but do you think that you will be alive all those years??

You can do that without going to the stars… our planet reflects light as well thus making it visible from other parts of the universe…. has the word “reflection” crossed your mind ? 😉

Contact me on my hangout I will help you [email protected]

bro just time travel its not that hard

Please help me to time travel, can I see myself when I go back in time like Harmaini sees herself in Harry potter?? Or can I send messages to myself I know the particular date when to send. It’s not the mistake I had done in my past but it was done by my father and brother who are safe, happy enjoying their lives,my life is totally ruined Please help me. Nazneen

I want to go back in time to save my wife .it was a bad mastake she died .that could be changed i need to go back and save her. Please help me.yours gordon sutcliffe

Would love to hear more how it’s possible, as I am really so desperate to go back in time. I lost my wife 6mons back because of COVID and I will do the impossible things to make it happen.

DMT Experience

what is that?

Dmt experience. Time travel, out of body and sometimes superhuman capabilities.

Jump into a black hole

We have to lose something(the past) to gain something(the future) in time travel.Time cannot be played with.Am I correct.

you need to have d e t e r m i n a t i o n

Time machine is possible

speeder than light LOL

speeder than light cuz if the light break it limits it will move backward in time

Don’t Just don’t disturb the past

I want to go back in time and see my dad. I miss him.

mee too raina I lost my father the day before you posted the comment 18th may, crap it hurts me so much. I would rather die to bring those moments back….

Everything is connected . Time isn’t real .

It is universe we travel to and not a time line in one universe

Ask trump….Mandela effect…. dmt 5th dimension

u need an X-WING starfighter and a lightsaber to fight the knights at past and a R2-B2 to track

The fact that no one has time travelled to the past is the proof that time travelling will NEVER exist.

Others have. Portals open most of the time. Example: Miami Fl. Magnetic Material gets bombarded by the sun. Which fractures and formed portals within that area. Ley lines can lead to the portals of travel within miami for just to start. One can laugh or wonder if. In my experience jumping for the better the word of it (Movie Jumper) can be done. You can either Teleport or Time Travel. Our sun open these portals everyday. The best time when Sun spots start to emerge. All that electrons traveling at light speed is enough to rupture our magnetic fields on Earth. You will return of course. Like water on a lake or an ocean time will corrects itself. Your inner clock is your ticket back home. With a little math,fourth dimensional thinking,a magnetic meter, the right location,history research and luck. You may get to expirence it. First clue….cold spots…it may not be a ghost.

Plz can you help me please help me you can save my life

I wish I could help you, I can sense your sufferings.

You need a bag of hyperlink modules to start, then nuclear beepbeep gatangas, when you have that come back here and I will tell you what you need next.

You need high voltage beepbeep gatangas and a large broonasic magnet of about 450 Gauss, come back here when you have these and I will tell you the rest.

you need an old fashioned police box

If you rotate the center of the earth in the opposite direction, then the whole earth can be moved back in time, on the other hand, if you move the center of the earth and change its position by separating it from the part of the earth, then you will be able to time correctly. Let’s reach the other side.

How I could time travel any time travel machines inverted

give audition in the flash series..

I think that to go back in time you’d to travel faster than the speed of light since time stops at the speed of light but if you wanted to go back to say mlk’s assassination you would need to go at least 10 times the speed of light

You don’t want to, the moment you wrote that message is a historical point in time.

When time travel is possible, you should d̵͔̮͉̣̯̳͌i̩͒̍̆͟ͅs͎̲̖͙̺ͬ̽̊͆͢r̖̹͆͂̚͘ê̛̫̪̱͇̘̩ͬg̖͉̤͚ͭͣ̊̌͜a̯̗͚̬͍̱̦͑͂͒͡ṟ̝ͦ͗͘d͋҉̪̖̥͔̟̟͚̻ ͎̬ͧ̔́i̧͚̫̻̇ͮͫ̆t̩̻͉̩̘̰̠̫̓̂̕ ̦̻̳̦̉͆̊̇̀i̴̗͍̞͙͇ͣ̈́mͦ̑ͦ̚͏͚̜̬̹̘̟̭m̱͕̻͇̮̠̰̼ͫ̌͆͡e̢͈̜̱ͩd̵̦͙͔̭̹̃̿̈̚ͅi̛̖̬͓͚̩̝̗ͯa̦͎̭̣̭̘͔͙̅̏́ṯ̴̟ͥ̀͗e̵͎̭͓̟͗ͨ̂͒l̼͕͕ͦͦ͜y̸͙̯̺̘͉ͣ,͈̻͙̭̺̘̞̑ͫ͜ ͔̗̣͒͜d̶͇͚͉̦̞̗͛̍o̞̮̻̲̜̠̒ͩ̈́̀ͅ ̲̙̦̮̺̉́͂̏̀ṋ̞͖̌͠o̬͕̯̩͓̮̫̝͛ͩ̐͛͜t̼̙̿͊͆̕ ̲͚̲̬̦̗̐̀m̢̹̜̭̠̬͗̆ͣą̲̺̻͈̹͎̈́̇̉͛ǩ̜̪̱̀e̜̳͔͉̣͓̓͗͘ ̉҉̲̞̘͈ͅc̴̦̣̝͇͈̙̋ͥ́o̫͇͇̘̻̠̹͎ͯ̀n̺̹̣̦̔̇̾͢t͚̹͚̙̞̪̗̺̄͂͜a̞̗̖̻̩͉̋͛̆͘c͙̙̎͘t̻̠̣͉̹̠̣̲̐ͧͩ̈́̕ ̶͕̗̬̿w͓̞͍̹̰͖͉ͦ͐͡i͎̞̾ͦ̃̈́̕t̜̺̖̭̍ͦ͞h͙̰̬̖͎̰͛̇ͮͫ͡ ͣͯ͏͕̻͚̹̺ā̱̙̝̦̤̼̥͡n̶͔̜ͥ͆̌̋y̷͓̻̺̺͉͇̻ͨọ̱͙̜̈́̉ͣ̔͟ņ̦̟͔̜̫̗̒ͬe̡͕̮̓͂̚ ̡͓̘͚̭̹͔̉͐͋̽t̖͍͚̝̬͈̝͌͋͘ͅẖ̗̖͚̼͔͕͆̓̾͜a͈̣͍͕͍̋ͦͩͭ͢t̖̪̤̳͎̱̏͡ ̛̻̠̼̬̓ͫl̶̞̤̣͔̗͔̂ͅö̹̞̦̖͚̫̜̱́ͯ͠o̧̯̱̪̓ͮ̋k͉͎̝̻̓ͧ̕s̤͈̪̍͟ ̤̞̳͔̝̪̟̹̔̂ͨ͜h̛̝̲̰̻͗̅̏̃u̜̙͐̇̈͝m̧̞̮̟̦̳̟̊a̸͓̺̲̼̜͊͛̐n̶̳̮̒.͇̻͚͓̳̺̜̱͋ͬ͗ͩ͢

It’s Close I can feel it

Yes it becomes a history but my life also in the past changes and the present also with it. The way I’m suffering from the pain and want to end my life I’m 100% sure at least sure no one around me is or was as hopeless and horrible as my hubby I’m devastated I really want to send a message to my past it may not start but it will definitely change. I was forced, not given any option, my father and brother gave me wrong information and had no concerns for me. It was just survival for me. I repent for not killing myself when I had time, but now if I have a chance why not. Now when I’m out of my marriage I come to know a guy then had feelings for me, was madly in love and wanted to ask for my hand, now I want to inform my self and change everything plz help me.

I too would like to go back in time. I just wish he lived a happy eternal life. I would just like to repeat to come back in 2020.

I heard from a guy in Idaho that time travel is possible. You’ll need to go online and purchase a pogo stick looking device and make sure not to forget the crystals.

I think u need a black-hole-proof spaceship, go to the centre, escape the black hole and viola! You are now in the past. If you can’t escape, then you’d travel to a time where that black hole didn’t exist.

Believe me you time travel! If not physically then you do mentally,like you through dreams.

Though they sale it online, it would not take the chance. It is as simple as beating the speed of light and having some system to send you to the time you want. Time however is not real, and were just traving universes. It will all be in the open in 2028 according to other travelers.

All you need base on how to travel to time is very simple but had to find firstly find a way to get to space through a space rocket secondly find a very perfect consifigration for traveling to tiTme then find a very fast rocket that could create a form of force reaction in space in order yo enable fast speed in space for the break through of non gravity in space and make sure that while doing all you activities is not far away from planet and not also to close to planet earth and make sure that you are with wristwatchs whose time is set disame then you can to the future

Man you can get all you need for too build a time machine in your local store man, man I sure wished I’d kept mine but it frightened the heck off me man, sometimes when I fart I find a grape in my pants

time travel is a fake, baseless and delusional idea. If you believe in that crap then tell us if we are living in the future or in the past. To travel backward the entire system has to return all along with nature and events, it won’t be for you alone except time travel only happens in the mind.

you would need to get about 1,000,000 pounds of silicon and then somehow conduct enough energy to make 500 cars run without an engine and then go to a nuqular power plant and somehow make a portal. but the whole world could go out of orbit if you do that so I wouldent sugest it.

Time machine is good and bad because,with the time machine you will know about your future which is not good.

Is time travel actually a real thing because if it is then I need it because I am trying to go back in time to fix all of my mistakes

So what if time travel is the reason that we now believe there are other realities in our own world.this could be that a Time traveler we could only go back and couldn’t come back, and on doing so if you do something to change the past in stead make a new reality.making other things are deferent and ours realty stays the same . sometimes reality gets mixed up make the mandela effect that we see today

Time in the future it is faster then now. The past is slower so you can travel . It is up to you. One way is to meditate. You can travel and see any body you want right now. You can fly faster then light. That is one way. You go to the future. To go to the past you sleep for a long time. Some time you go to the future or the past. Your heart well stop and your body gets cold. Sometimes you can control it sometimes you can’t.

but how do we know that is really true ? i mean i want to figure this out, i want to time travel, but how is it that simple ? so many people have been trying to figure this out for many years and its that simple ?

Yeah what if you get stuck in there what do you do than

You cant go there in the first place. Dont worry. With current technology, we will only end up messing some few microseconds. Highly doubtful, if we can end up getting the news of travelling hundreds of years in our lifetime.

wait what would happen if someone saw you while you where in past/future i’m curious

Time is an illusion based on perceived reality and is only relative to our limitations. Time isn’t what it seems and all things can’t be figured out

Im on a school computer looking this up and i found this article and scrolling trough it and ive not heard one statement here as good as yours bro

This is blowing my mind people, then I see the school boy on the post. Great stuff, whoever reads this is already capable of travelling through time. Think about all people who have posted on this thread, now think about who will read mine. Now think of those €opposite trolls $ who never ever bother posting on you tube thread etc. But ONE comment from one of the time travellers who wrote on this thread. So that opposite troll is me,I don’t normally post.however because of previous comments I’m posting here. And I love the DMT shit I loved that and lived that one out in real life,,,,another day.

So my point is ifOne or two threads have made me write this….then what will my post make others write , think…..then I could travel back and not write this…. then what. Love the conception of time how can u travel something that doesn’t YOU perceive to be time, like a train can only run on its train tracks, a car can only drive on a road etc It’s posibble I know it is. Sometimes when u have fun times moves swift but locked in jail it goes snail pace. U c me. I write letters to myself from past from future. Remember everything that happens in present becomes part the past. But the future is what you hold in your hands. Question is, now you know….what the f are u gonna do about it?.. 01/04 ==== 21

Hahahah only realised school boy is named BIG dick pissing myself laughing I gotta go pee. Respect certified

so not halal mode

True so were not traveling in time. It is just different universe (on what we call) different time, day, tears, etc.

You would be scared for life

you will desepear

Maybe it has happened before and we just don’t know that they’re from the future. If people in the future time traveled, the would know that it’s dangerous to mess with the past and would pretend to be part of the past.

I believe time travel is already possible, however we cannot fix past mistakes without altering future predicaments. Say we stop JFK’s assasination, that would completely change the future from that point forward to one none of us can know/guess or conclude the effects? Other time travel purposes go to the future I think that from now our world will die off before 2096 basdd on overpopulation, global warming & polution as such creating islands of plastic waste in our oceans. The best thing my opinion go back to the garden of Eden, kill that Serpent Satan before he tricks Eve into the forbidden fruit. Then let God raise, enlighten & teach us how to be humanly sustainable on his planet & I guarantee technology & smart phones? Ain’t no part of it!!

Time travel possible but one n only theory of Stephen hawking

How it is possible to jump in time …??

Many ways. The most used is creating a black hole which can be done in a few ways. 1) traveling forwards or backwords faster than the speed of light 2) been known during heavy lightning strikes. Each way is a fast movement that opens the black hole. It has been done by the Government since the 1980s though they claimed they never beet the speed of light until 2002. However, Time is a illusion and their for we are actually traveling different universe that are differnt than ours even if the difference is by 1 thing. Each universe may have (what we call) different time, days and years. And each time we change that time line we created a new one. It is belief as CERN has said they destroy 5 universe, that they can travel to them. Since 2012 it has seem we been shifting and is now belief they have possibly came together. The event is known as The Mandela Effect.

No one has the right theory in my thinking. Only a few things are wrong. It is universes with (what we call) different time, days and years we are traveling to and not time itself as it is a illusion. Their is no stop to how much we can do, or where we can go. No limit as such say.

There is no God. No magical serpent or Garden of Eden ever existed. Basing a scientific theory on archaic stories does no one any good.

You choose a hopeless eternity. I choose hope through the promise of salvation through Christ for those who believe. You see, I have child in heaven. Thankfully, have a hopeful reality that I can embrace. There is a God. Our known universe is only 14 or so billion years old… is it mathematically possible that random molecules out of the Big Bang mixed in just the right way from to form a complex cellular organism… with DNA… and result in humans and such diversity of life forms? It’s naive to accept this as a result of chance. Think about it. How is that remotely possible without a creator?

Hahaha. You make it seem as tho the big bang happened, and we just popped into existence? Naw it’s called evolution baby, we started out as microscopic organisms, seriously, when did you drop out of school? But that’s like saying a some guy writes a book to explain away natural phenomenons that they were to stupid (un-evolved) to grasp and the concept good and bad and the eternal damnation, And thus, the Bible, and boom, everyone now was made by God, hahaha. When you can prove he/she exists, and that the Bible was a autobiography, and not just some twisted piece of Fiction, that has no real basis in reality, and cannot be proved to be more that a work of Fiction. Rather than being used as the16th Century control tact, ‘be good or you’ll go to hell’. But I guess that’s what they mean when they say ignorance is bliss, (maybe if I was as ignorant as y’all believers I’d believe to). But I can’t see how a ‘GOD’ would ever ask one of its creations to kill another.. Genocide, Crusades, all the ethnic cleansing.. All In the name of God Almighty! Hahahahahhaaa. Aliens are more believable than this shit, and theirs no proof they exist either. Hahahahaha. Fug’n Bible thumpers. ‘Step out side your faith and see the world for what it really is, a complex organism, mad of gravity and dust, quite a unique specimen! And we, yes Bible bangers, this includes you, are destroying it like the bubonic plague.’. ‘The end is coming and it’s our fault’

Have you taken the time to read The Old Testament and the prophecies therein that came to be ?.

How do you explain that ?.

My last post should read GS not G

You have not had an encounter yet with God. Don’t be so certain on yuour theory of evolution. He came and shook my reality to it’s core. Made thing possibly that no one could ever explain.

What are you talking about? Ur so wrong and funny in every way.

BlissfullyInformed just told me his comment was all an April fools prank. He believes in Jesus and was just fooling.

Time travel is very much possible just as you decided to come existence in this century meaning one can decide to be in another time zone . life is all about numbers, you just have to work on numbers

I’m pretty sure ppl don’t decide to come into existence. If that were true I wouldn’t be replying to your comment.

Un like your other reply, I understand what you mean. Each timeline (or universe as some see it) can easily be traveled to at will. No different than traveling threw your time you want to visit.

Science has proven a few things from the Bible is true. God does exist. Christians are confused with time and what it says. For a example. God created the world, as science even belives it was God who created the big bang, yet the bang has happen itself creating the moon, planets and stars. Christians also fail to understand chapter 1 and 2 of gen. spoke of two different creations which can be why we see dinosaurs before humans as chapter 1 spoke of animals first and humans 2nd. Their also was different time than, as without the moon a full day is 6 hours. It would take 4 days back than to equal are 1 day. Time is lost and Christians are just confuse on that time. That does not proof their is no God. As they have already found the robes of Jesus and remains of Noah’s ark, it proves much did happen. The bible only has less than 50% of what was written.

Changing the past is impossible, because if we went back into the past, that means we were already there during the time you experienced it.

We all know how to get into time travel but how do we get out……..

You don’t need time travel – all you need is life. And what is life? Life is the evolution of the impossible into the inevitable over an infinite amount of time.

if it is shown that if something, such as a solution to a particular class of equations, were possible, then two mutually contradictory things would be true, such as a number being both even and odd. The contradiction implies that the original premise is impossible.

This is called proof by impossibility. Thus if some traveled back in time far enough to kill his grandfather, we have the contradiction and therefore it is impossible.

You could argue that he would be able to time travel, but not kill his grandfather. However almost anything a person does going back in time would cause the same contradiction, thererfore it is the traveling back in time that is impossible.

Actually, it probably is possible to travel back in time, however to do so, you would also have to travel so far in space that you cannot see anything that happened before your current time due to the speed of light, because this to could affect the future.

The reason I am here is that, i really want to go back the day when our matriculation exam was just finished. Everything around me is peaceful and happy. Currently, I am living in dire situation. People are dying outside on the streets. Smokes everywhere. Everything is in doom. Ah, yeah. I really miss my past. If you are reading this, you can judge me in anyways. I just want to live peacefully and happily.

You must live in Portland

I entirely know what you say and how you feel, Robin. I am totally convinced that future is no promise to offer a better place to live. World is becoming unnecessarily more complex and more horrible and more insecure. Therefore, travelling back in time to a point where things were still far away from such ordeals is what I aspire. But I think if it is possible to travel back in time without the possibility of carrying our lived experiences with us, it will be useless as we will be repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Now, this begs the questions “in what type of physique could we imagine ourselves back there if such time travel becomes possible? That is, becoming younger again in a physical regression (as I said this would be a torture without having learned from all these later years)? Or appearing at our desired times in our present physique and age? I believe the most ideal one would be if we appeared at our desired point in time at the same age that we were at that point of time with a good feeling of our later lived experiences.

Mam all u need to do is just run faster as much as u can or visit the black hole because in both condition time just slow it down ….

Time travel is simple. If you do happen to travel to the past you create a new time line not affecting the time line you left. In essence you going to the past is now your future. Even if you were able to return you may never know if you remained in your time-line or created a new one. So even if you changed something in your travels it would happen in the future not the past.

Sorry time traveling is not possible, there is no way you can go into the past or the future ‍♂️. You can only be in the time you are already in.

Incorrect. General relativity allows time travel into the future. You need a space ship that can travel extremely fast though, approaching the speed of light, or you need to get close to a supermassive black hole.

It is travel into the past that there is no known practical way to do, and is probably impossible.

So what happens when we Die? Where do we go? I want to go back in time so I can meet my childhood friends…

Simple question from a simple mind:

At what point, when a person says they are from the future, do we stop throwing them in the funny farm and actually start listening??

When they show actual proof. Not just some random prediction of the future.

I don’t believe that “glimpses into the future” could be possible. If it were so, we could glimpse blueprints of the future that we could bring back to the present and build before they were invented. My personal.beleif is in any time frame there is only one active time which is the present. The past no longer exists and the future hasn’t occurred yet, so there is no such thing as ‘time travel’ except for the frame we are in now.

First off time is not real we make time if you travel anywhere all you are doing is beating the Earth speed try this for a mathematical equation the Earth travels a thousand miles per hour you’re not beating human time that is your own equation the Earth travels a thousand miles per hour a space shuttle travel 17,000 mph you can beat time that you made so time is not real you are only beating the Earth speed if you go in a space shuttle and go around the earth 17,000 miles per hour the Earth only travels a thousand miles per hour plus it has all types of gravitational pull from the Moon Earth’s access on the til t you figure out the mathematical equation I cannot time travel is real if you can beat the Earth speed and we can it has nothing to do with its 12:00 it’s 1:00 that’s not real time is made up as a mathematical equation you can beat the Earth speed you can go back into the Earth’s time in a space shuttle but you’re not beating anything except the Earth’s speed think about that one time is not real at all all it is is a mathematical equation think about that one real long

What I’m trying to say is this a space shuttle travel 17,000 mph the Earth travels a thousand you beat it 16 times faster that’s all you did you’re not beating any time you’re not beating 1:00 you’re not beating 3:00 all you’re doing is beating the Earth’s time you can go in reverse around the Earth 17,000 mph okay you can go forward with the Earth’s centrifugal force 17,000 miles per hour you’re not beating anything you’re beating a mathematically equation that we we created astronauts been traveling time for instance for years and haven’t told us because of the space shuttle that does travel 17,000 mph it beats the Earth speed 16 times a boggles my mind you have the Earth access the moon gravitational pull but you can get in a space shuttle and travel 17,000 miles per hour and beat the Earth’s speed 17 times think about it

If any scientist or anybody can actually answer this question how do you set up this equation with the Earth spinning a thousand miles per hour you have the moon pulling gravity the Earth’s access on until I want to know tell me then wondering for a while this equation popped into my head about 2 years ago I’m not a math whiz or anything I just thought about it weird how the mind works I’m not into space or any space stuff at all I’m Samanthas boy friend John antos wrote this

I liked your post and the knowledge you given. I also written a post on Time Travel.

how would any of that stuff be true because e’*34+Em would stop all the forss of vissecs and how would we do it if you now what i mean??? also thanks for the scuff for my project

I would love it if I had a real life time machine here with me now which could take me to anytime I want, the past, present or future. If I had a time machine here with me now, I would go to the past in September 2004 when I was born and give myself to another family that is actually rich and not this horrible family that I have now.

that not nice

Close but not quite right scientists of the idiotic variety, yes, you don’t want people to travel back in time to mess with their own pasts, of course, but you say it’s impossible, but it’s not, and I’m always ignored with my crazed crackpot theories, so what’s the harm in telling the truth as I see it, while it could be possible to travel to the past, here in lies the problem with rewriting the future, while some believe it’s possible to travel back in time, but it’s very expensive and definitely a one-way trip to the future or to the past. Basically Doc Brown got the mechanism for time travel almost right but the energy out put needs to be quadrupled instead, allowing for the ‘physical item, being or vehicle’ to transport through time without killing the time traveler in question. Wormholes are unpredictable, until warp speed for spaceships are a thing, it is not possible for the space ships to achieve time travel, unless they want to enter a black hole, which I would not recommend. as you need warp speed to survive the emptiness of the black hole, without being ripped to shreds. Say for example, Back to the future 1, the timeline doesn’t erase it continues on without the ‘said time traveler’ in existence basically the Marty from Wimpy George’s timeline did time travel to the past and messed with his parent’s meeting so to speak, but never return to the same timeline therefore Marty A went known as a Missing Child in timeline A, while it continues on without him, however Marty A became Marty B/C, in the Successful George Timeline. So that is what I’m talking about. the timeline changes only for the time traveler themselves the ones who are left behind don’t experience a thing of timeline rewritten-ism, as it would never happen in the first place. The other thing is if you want to mess with your own childhood, to make a better life for the past self, the key thing to remember it’s not really you. It’s an alternative version of you, that you interfered with. creating a parallel timeline to it’s original, yet slightly different. Yes it would be awkward to raise yourself. but as long as you are staying in the past, nothing should happen until the age you traveled back in time, unless of course you touched your past self and suddenly de-aged and merged with your past self, is an option 1, option 2 the future self explodes spreading guts all over the place and therefore the past self, of you became a murderer of your future self, I am more inclined to believe option 1 as option 2 seems a little too out there. Basically you would have two memories one of the former timeline and one of the current different timeline. Still traveling through time is truly a one way trip and if you want to travel through time, you would need some time travel mechanism, the way you scientist talk is basically a dream version, or an OBE version (OUT-OF-BODY-EXPERIENCE) which is basically a vivid/lucid dream which is not true time travel, the true time travel is based on the BTTF Trilogy not the idiotic versions you preach about. I believe I’ve said enough.

Mystery solved and I will explain, I was in a coma 3 months and I experienced things, I traveled time forward and backward, it is not a one way ticket. Movies and songs are recorded on magnetic tape in a VCR tape Cartridge or Cassette tape, Magnetic tape recording works by converting electrical signals into magnetic energy, which imprints a record of the signal onto a moving tape covered in magnetic particles. 3D life on earth(a movie), and the Magnetosphere all around earth coming from the core of earth(MAGNETIC ACTIVITY) without Atom Made Tape, is like a movie on magnetic Atom made tape in a VCR tape cartridge. Revolution and Rotation is the motor(VCR).

This is why people have those freaky Deji’vu feelings like they have lived this before, BECAUSE YOU HAVE, and how people can be psychic, and how there is Prophecy in the Bible. When a person dies, their Spirit- MIND(Thoughts, Feelings, Urges(Physical and mental personality)) breaks out of human body- a stopped heart is what releases the spirit from the human body. Then the Soul(Life) with the memory of your existence in it breaks out of spirit and goes back to your birthday with a erased memory, meanwhile your spirit goes back in time to when you were a teenager starting the mental puberty, maturity from that adult spirit you died with in last life.In that old movie Star Wars or maybe it was the Empire Strikes Back, there is a scene where Princess Laya plays like a 3D movie, that is EXACTLY how its of life on earth.

If only wish I could undo everything what I’ve done wrong in the past, I’d be more happier

And that my friend is absolutely what you do not or would not know. Everyone focuses on what they don’t or haven’t had rather than what positives they do have around them. To change the ingredients of a past life only changes the flavour you have in this life, it does not make you happier.

No, travel to the future is not possible. Like, future is unpredictable and always have been so give up on that field

Already has been, and has been proven.

Time travel is not so possible for every one , but there are already time travelers on earth #@*

Who are these time travelers?

Depends if it is the Governments (they done it since the 80s), or if it was a Accidental travel, or a simple us creating our own machine. Either way, one can easily find storys, and other evidence with a good research. I have a website that shows the effects of change cause by time travel.

They are out their (done by the government since the 80s) but the future is open with time travel (told its open since 2028) so they travel back much.

Time travel 101-

Create a closed loop circuit around a full metal structure, hermetically seal it and bring O2, Use two tesla coils to create north and south poles. (Artificial Magneto sphere.) Make sure to pain the outside in lead to prevent any cosmic rays from penetrating the materials on the inside. (Radiation = bad). Connect a ball made of w/e with wires that alternate the current from the coils to w/e panel on the outside of the structure to make it move via inductive magnetic / electric Lorentzo (Lorentzo = ExMfield = Velocity. = Antigravity) Create Antigravity by using forces from the inside reactor. (Pressurized Mercury, and Tesla Turbine.) Then Move 10-100x faster than light depending on the charged field, Friction will be added to the electric field instead of the craft allowing the G-forces not to crush you inside. The field will take the pressures of outer space, The temperature of space will allow for super conductivity of the structure.

Eventually you will arrive in the future, if you stay in one place. but account for the movement of earth in your travel log. To see outside you will need a monitor / camera system, as any leaks through a viewing area will cause death by radiation from the cosmic rays from the field you have created.

The O2 can be used as a backup generator, through air pressure and the tesla turbine.

There are many different ways to make wormholes, but the curvature of space is really hard to calculate to send a machine far out to the end and create a link with the machine that wants to travel there. And leaving one behind to get back.

If you can imagine it, it can be done. You just need the knowledge of not dying to complete it.

U.S.S. Tourist, You’re a time traveler or just insanely smart.

You don’t need to go the speed of light. Human Time is recorded in the magnetospere as a movie is record, ed on magnet VCR Tape or a song on a record. A VCR or record does not have to go light speed to retrieve the recorded info. All of life is recorded in 3D by our Magnetosphere. My Analogy is imagine a VCR tape cartridge being the earth, imagine life on earth being the movie but in 3D with out adom made tape, imagine Rotation and Revolution of Earth being the VCR putting all in to motion- playing. That is how its done, the magnetosphere kills two birds with one stone, it protects earth and records time, human time is in a magnetic bubble that is why the Bible refers our time is different from gods time and this is how God the maker(PLANET OF UNITED SUPREME BEINGS) can flip through our time to know everything. By the way long before life on earth, he built the original 7 wonders of world(Pyramids) to Pump the Seven gasses into the atmosphere of this planet found in the goldilocks zone, so Life can live on it, and that life of all types is his technological cyborgs that grow and multiply on earth also he seeded it with plant, trees, sea creature and things that fly,. Anyway that above is how time is recorded.

Until recently, I thought my neighbor was a crackpot until he actually invented a time machine. He utilized an ordinary closet, and showed me the sophisticated (to me) instrumentation he had installed. I was very skeptical at first, until he offered a small demonstration and entered the time coordinates and energized his invention. To my amazement, when I opened the door, the clock on the wall was 30 minutes later than when we stepped into the machine. OMG!!! Destroy this thing before it destroys us!!!.

So happy to have my husband back after 6 months of separation. get any kind of relationship/marriage help you want from….Robinsonbuckler11 @gmail com………………………

I find it odd that people say time travel isn’t possible yet… If time travel is possible, it has always existed. Meaning, there is not past present it future, only our perception of time. What we know as past present and future have always been occurring simultaneously, so travel was invited the moment the universe wss formed. Dinosaurs are roaming the earth right now, and forever. A version of me is typing this and has always been typing this, within this perceived moment of “time” and time travel has always happened, whether or not we exist in that reality at the right “time” to observe time travel is the only question.

I find it odd that people say time travel isn’t possible yet… If time travel is possible, it has always existed. Meaning, there is no past present or future, only our perception of time. What we know as past present and future have always been occurring simultaneously, so travel was invited the moment the universe was formed. Dinosaurs are roaming the earth right now, and forever. A version of me is typing this has always been typing this, within this perceived moment of “time” and time travel has always happened, whether or not we exist in that reality at the right “time” to observe time travel is the only question.

Their had to be one point however, when it was created and started, and for that, there was nothing but the current time. Once it was created, than we had a pass, present and future to which we can go back to millions of years to see Adam and Eve with the dinosaurs or go millions of years in the future. However, given the events that changes, each time a new time line has been created. We also have destroyed the planet and repopulated many times in the last million years. Each event changed, or something we do different (without traveling) enters a new universe where some things may be different or the same. Today are universe are shifting a lot.

To be fair, even if it is a one way trip into the past, that doesn’t stop machines going back. We could send a machine back and order it to do anything we want and then tell it to meet us at a certain time in the future. We send it back, then go straight to the meeting point we agreed and then we’ll be able to prove if it worked or not.

I’m a girl who has read a book about seeing future through a box. So is it actually possible?

Time travel has been done on purpose by the Government since the late 1980s. From research, the mostly use kids, or future Presidents. Their are some cases where people have been struck by lightning or came across some tragically event that cause them to leave their timeline either forward or behind in time. The Mandela Effect is the current cause of how things go wrong when time travel is not done right. Click on my name to see the website.

Even as traveling to a location as a future or pass date is possible as what people here mean. However, as you said, it is numbers. Time is a illusion and we do not travel threw time, just universe that are different than ours. What we call time dates and months is what changes each universe. We are all from different universes today as they came together. The mandela effect is a fine example.

thx to eleon wont we soon be able to digitize our conscious being, then accelerate that data pass the speed of light some how then download it into some android or something…..i dunno…..just a thought

I want to go to my elementary school again. Someone help me out, I know its Idiotic but stil.. I am not good at science. As far I understood, 1) we can trace through time if we travel fast than speed of light.. I think memory os the only thing that is faster than light, Yeah I can go to Paris within 1 sec in my memory but yeah its illustion, i want in real 2) Through Blackhole – I think its Bermuda triangle

if you travel back in time you will still be your age now. That is how it worked with others. No one gets younger otherwise traveling to far back would kill you. No school would let you return to school as a adult so not possible.

Plz help me I just want to send a message to myself in my past and save my self from a beast plz help Nazneen

Would love to experience many moments in life again for the first time again!

I think that time traveling should be left alone, for the sake of humanity. There are some things we’re not ready for yet.

Well stephen hawking may be wrong. I mean, the study proved that the universe self corrects itself to prevent inaccuracies. So maybe tourists from past do visit us but we don’t remember them as the universe alters our memory. If you guys have read about Butterfly Effect, a simple mistake today may grow through years to become a giant disaster in future so if you think of it, oncoming tourists from future may cause giant inaccuracies. Imagine this, You have travelled to past. You brought two cakes for yourself, so you pay the shopkeeper 20$. The shopkeeper invests the 20$ in stocks, strikes gold there and becomes a rich businessman.His daughter goes to Cambridge and marries someone else than the person she was supposed to marry according to time. Can you imagine the magnitude of inaccuracy after 100 years? Therefore, whatever the tourists from future do, is corrected by the universe and we don’t remember it. Creepy, but food for thought.It also adds a special meaning to the word ‘Fate’.

How much wacky terbacky (i.e. weed) you be smokin’ JOE JOE?

Hmmmm…. As brilliant of a mind as Stephen Hawkins was, how is he so sure that he would even recognize hordes of tourists from the future? Almost everyone is aware of the warning of the Butterfly Effect. So I’m sure any future visitors Intelligent enough for Past-Time travel would be amply attuned to this.

Most future people coming to the pass (our time) seems careless and not intelligent. Most are taking FBI lie detector test and telling us what is happening in the future. That is a bad idea, because if you tell us (example) who is the next President, and the Government does not like the person they than can change that event to let someone else in (as seen in 2020) One should never acknowledge who he or she is or why they are their. Most traveling is to get knowing of the pass or to pick up certain things. Since are pass is changing, events are changing and are timelines are messed up, someone made a mistake. The Mandela Effect is a fine example.

Wow that’s great plz help me go to my past plz,I can’t do it by my own at least help me send a msg to myself in my past Nazneen

I think it is possible, but time traveling is really just changing universe created by different time lines. Our whole solar system is in a whole different place now and Earth is much smaller in this universe from the one I grew up end. Someone has already changed the timeline.

Roads? Where we’re going, you don’t need roads!

Youre wrong about your measurement of speed for traveling, in order for time to slow down, with inside an object compared to outside. Scientists proved that time with inside an object at an excelorated speed actually appeared to have slown down during the duration of time for the test. The speed was far less then the terminal speed of a rocket for NASA at 256,000 kms p/h.

In to the volicity of space. Generating a vacuum of space, could be no different the the actual transport of matter over frequency where in fact matter can be carried by sound. It is believed that an alien civilization harnessed this energy in the form of bolisks that where believed to carry the same properities and in consideration of harmonic resinance, the simularities could be used in order to carry large weight. In accordance with a documentry on theoretical science.

However the properties, present the fact that a working property controdicts your counter intuative theory of gravitational deceloration of matter to colide within itself to absorb all things into non existance as to the transfer of matter into energy, rather then your idiolisms of transfer between dimentional space to another destination that is not linked or the transfer between time that isnt, either.

However to reproduce the fabric of time within space in a practical measurement as I have mentioned, would put an end to all the lunacy of an unmeasureable field, which people fail to identify. Like running into a glass window. Only to not know what forcefield is present.

Time travel into the past can be achieved simply going faster than the speed of light.

The closer you get to the speed of light the slower time goes

If you reach the speed of light time stops

If you go faster than the speed of light it starts to reverse

Why does no one seem to know this?

Christopher Reeves did this in Superman 3 brah.

Any time travel, pass and future, is by going faster than the speed of light. It is said by reversing that that you can go back in time. However, I assume since the Government has done this since the 80s they have better ways (maybe tying in a date) and not having to go to a unknown date.

I want to send a message to myself in the past on a particular date plz can you help me, this means a lot lot lot to me,plz help me Nazneen

Why don’t we drop the declaratory statements that it “is or isn’t possible!” Until someone actually does so. Just say “maybe”.

People have and their are records both to the pass and future. The Government has done it since the 80s as part of the “star wars project” and are much better at it today. This explains the black holes in the sky of 2019, and the CERN destroying 5 parallel universes in 2013. We also see changes because of time travel events changing time. The Mandela Effect is a find example.

I want to send a msg to myself and my family in the past ,is it possible plz help me my life will be saved one who helps me saves me and my kids from a pack of beasts,

The worst idea ever. We all want to do this and where does it stop. A lottery win does not sound bad if you knew the actual location, time and place. After a while though, would you not want to write that hit song, become the author of the Harry Potter books, stop 9/11? The idea of giving your pass self (a time time travel was not proven) information of the future could change things in a major way. This would cause one small thing to change creating many others to change. This has already happen in simple ways of the The Berenstein Bears changing to The Berenstain Bears. This is a small event but this event “The Mandela Effect” now has over 3,000 changes.

What if you decided to give your pass self information about a lottery ticket that would be a winner, bought late at night and he was hit by a car on the way to get it. Changes the whole future. However, If detailed right, done right, with no large changes, it may not effect much, but to know your being given info from yourself in a future time (when that was not known much or provrn back than) You would either assume it is a joke or you gone crazy.

I don’t want to win a lottery, my decision about my career and studying was right but my family and their cruelty has put me into this worst condition I just want to go back complete my studies and live a life like a human not like a animal or slave,help me plz Nazneen

Can someone take me to 2013? i can pay later to all of you in bitcoins so its a win win and you dont need to do anything, just wait

LOL but still complicating on my side

You travel in your dreams where time and space colloids ..That’s y sometimes the dream which you dreamt might be a 10 mins reel time but you felt dreaming whole time like 6 to 8hrs .. Probably even traveling to parallel universe

I agree. Dreams as we know it is not a simple sleep. The part of the brain we do not use while awake, we use at night. This is the phenomenon part of the brain that can do thing we feel a human can not do. We of course use less than 30% of our brain. By the use of 100% of the brain we would use both sides and be able to do common things such as read thoughts, move things without touching them etc. The idea of using this side of the brain, would be the theory we can leave our bodies and visit different universe, see what could of happen shall we done something different, and even see future events. This may be why we notice different memories to some things as we could of held some from another reality.

It would be very weird, however, if we were trapped in that universe, or another body and fail to return to ours. Is that how people die in their sleep?

i just fell like going to late 70’s, where i can see majority of family.. i am willing to trade life for it…..

Time travel to the pass is just as common as the future. However, as both has been done it is NOT travel threw time. Time is a illusion we created. We are actually traveling threw different universe with (what we call) different time, dates, years, etc. The Mandela Effect is a find example how traveling threw different reality’s change the time lines.

As a add on to the above, Time travel is not a theory, has been proven, and has been done by the Government since the 1980s. Their is many residue in our history to even show some time travel storys to be real.

Where can one get a reverse watch, is it really possible to go back in past with its help, is it sooo easy ,plz help me ??????? Nazneen

US20060073976A1- search this patent number,this describes the process for time travelling,I really don’t think magnetic energy will work,maybe heat focused on a specific point could expand the fabric of space and make a hole in it.even then I will the hole take you to another time.it would be one thing to time travel but selecting a point in time would be impossible.you could only travel to the time you device was built?

Is there a watch which back travels in time or reverse time watch? Is it true? How to get one? But with that how can I send a message to myself in my past, plz help Nazneen

I don’t believe such a watch exist and their are plenty of smart minds with huge funds trying to travel.right now there are only theories.

Thank you very much for your response. I just want to send a message to myself in my past. Nothing much will be changed but 3 literally dying devastating lives will be saved. We are suffering for the mistakes and egoistic arrogance of others so if possible plz help me

Traveling back in time isn’t just a when problem, it’s a *where* problem. Where was the place you’re standing right now a thousand years ago, or a thousandth of a second ago? There is no useful answer to those questions, so there’s nowhere to travel back in time to.

Traveling forward in time? You’re doing it now.

when you step through a door is time lost when you come back through? lets say you return days Later how much time did you loose. what exactly is Time,.? is dialation a safe way to return ,. a Blackhole will assist you in in travel, the question is will you arrive safe,.

Traveling back in time is impossible. 2 reasons why that are never taken into account.

A) The stuff you are made of ( subatomic material) is being used by something else. It I not like you are a facsimile of the already existing material. What you are made of is exactly the same existing material. The problem is exact stuff can not exist in 2 different places in the same point in time. You will either : Decompile or fall out of phase with the universe. Both bad outcomes for the time traveler.

B) Lets look at it from logical commonsense. You have a bar of gold . You intend to send the bar back 1 second in time. Now you have 2 bars of gold . You send those 2 bars back one second . You have 4 bars …… do that 50 times . You have over 900 trillion bars of gold. All made of the exact subatomic particles. The more the bars back the more the existing mass of the universe increase. What are the consequences of changing the mass of the universe . Hence the paradox . Information can not be destroyed., It also can not be created.

At least this is the way my brain perceives going back in time.

Time is a function of change. None of the 4 forces The strong force , The weak force , Electromagnetism and Gravity can not work without time.

I will figure out time travel one day but only for the past.

I wish I could travel back to 18th of June to save my mom.

Is time travel really a one way ticket? Theoretically, if you can go one way, you should be able to go back.

Time is not one way. It’s consequences are however irreparable given certain circumstances and is not something that should be taken lightly or thought of in a manner of disregard. I’ve only very recently decided to take to your social platforms regarding space and time.

You can try finding me on Instagram. I’m not familiar with these platforms to better direct you there. My Instagram name is johnrvh

On Twitter it seems to be @_JohnRvH

If I go forward I will have to pay extra bills and taxes. I don’t think I can afford it.

You’re the first person I’ve come across in this timeline that has a sense of humor. Thankfully, going forward is not possible if that future hasn’t been created yet.

timetraval is no joke if its created the whole universe could go out of orbit.

Cauchy problem converging to non minimal terraces as t → +∞

Stephen Hawking may he rest in peace a genius but not all knowing. As far as he knows we haven’t been flocked by tourists, in the same maybe these UFO sightings are actually time travelers from the future coming to the past to view how we really lived why things really happened the way they did, etc. To limit the imagination of possible and impossible is wrong then you create fantasy. And we have learned from history that there is truth in fantasy. I.e. the different mythos of the different ancient cultures from around the world including those of the Norse. Improbable and probable should be more appropriate. It’s possible because it can be imagined improbable die to the right math or this or that not existing or matching up. I also believe that if time travel to the past were possible that the changing of something in the past would create a new timeline running current with your timeline at which will inevitably collide and will cause the collapse of the universe at which point a new universe will be born.

so i think the speed of light is only relative to deciding a point of destination -initially- as specific gravity of destination needs to be ascertained to calculate the frequency needed to run an alcubierre-white engine to bend space correctly to cross space ‘quickly’, the point of reference may well be jupiter in our solar system for the fact of the moons that orbit it, i surmise that by using a ‘dead end ‘ equation that usually puts notable mathematicians into the outer regions by trying to solve it may actually be the key as calculations end in a loop of 4-2-1 ie 3N+1; this process of calculation creates a sine wave over time/distance relative to specific gravity of chosen destination – as time is determined by gravity therefore if the speed of light to a destination can be used to ascertain the specific gravity of a ‘body’ to visit ie a star or sun due to receivable resonant frequencies emitted by the body, then the constrictions of the speed of light do not exist other than to give a constant, by using the 3N+1 method of calculation ,once the speed of light and returning resonant frequencies of a destination are determined the calculation can be extrapolated to match the distance giving the end point -in doing this the sine wave required can be ascertained and be condensed to create a wormhole and allow the alcubierre-white engine to ‘bend or distort space enough so that the bubble you are in matches the required specific gravity of the destination – the frequency of the body nearest to the destination point should be used and resonated inside the bubble to create synchronicity of frequency and cause attraction i also believe that travelling through space require the ability to see things from different perspectives and it requires the ability to navigate through a series of what may be described as “Aims Windows” where your point of view needs to change inherently with a given position at a given point in the galaxy

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Time Travel: Dream or Possible Reality?

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Time travel is a favorite plot device in science fiction stories and movies. Perhaps the most famous recent series is Dr. Who , with its traveling Time Lords who whisk throughout time as if traveling by jet. In other stories, the time travel is due to unexplainable circumstances such as a too-close approach to a very massive object like a black hole. In Star Trek: The Voyage Home , the plot device was a trip around the Sun that hurled Kirk and Spock back to 20th century Earth. In the popular movie series Back to the Future , the characters traveled both backward and forward in time. However it is described in stories, traveling through time seems to pique people's interest and ignite their imaginations. But, is such a thing possible? 

The Nature of Time

It's important to remember that we are always traveling into the future. That's the nature of space-time. This is why we remember the past (instead of "remembering" the future). The future is largely unpredictable because it hasn't happened yet, but everyone is headed into it all the time.

To speed up the process, to peer further into the future, to experience events more quickly than those around us, what would or could anyone do to make it happen? It's a good question without a definitive answer. Right now, no one has built a working time machine to travel temporally.

Traveling into the Future

While it's not possible (yet) to travel to the future fast than the rate at which we're doing it now, it is possible to speed up the passage of time. But, it only happens in small increments of time. And, it has only happened (so far) to very few people who have traveled off Earth's surface. For them, time moves at an infinitesimally different rate. Could it happen over longer time spans? 

It might, theoretically. According to Einstein's theory of special relativity , the passage of time is relative to an object's speed. The more quickly an object moves through space, the more slowly time passes for it compared to an observer traveling at a slower pace. 

The classic example of traveling into the future is the twin paradox . It works like this: take a pair of twins, each 20 years old. They live on Earth. One takes off on a spaceship on a five-year journey traveling at nearly the speed of light . The traveling twin ages five years while on the journey and returns to Earth at the age of 25. However, the twin who stayed behind is 95 years old! The twin on the ship experienced only five years of time passing, but returns to an Earth that is much farther into the future.

Using Gravity as a Means of Time Travel

In much the same way that traveling at speeds close to the speed of light can slow down perceived time, intense gravitational fields can have the same effect.

Gravity only affects the movement of space, but also the flow of time. Time passes more slowly for an observer inside a massive object's gravitational well. The stronger the gravity, the more it affects the flow of time. 

Astronauts on the  International Space Station experience a combination of these effects, though on a much smaller scale. Since they are traveling quite quickly and orbiting around Earth (a massive body with significant gravity), time slows down for them compared to people on Earth. The difference is much less than a second over the course of their time in space. But, it is measurable.

Could We Ever Travel into the Future?

Until we can figure out a way to approach the speed of light (and warp drive doesn't count , not that we know how to do that at this point, either), or travel near black holes (or travel to black holes for that matter) without falling in, we won't be able to do time travel any significant way into the future. 

Travel into the Past

Moving into the past is also impossible given our current technology. If it were possible, some peculiar effects could occur. These include the famous "go back in time and kill your grandfather" paradox. If you did do it, you couldn't do it, because you already killed him, so therefore you don't exist and can't go back in time to do the dastardly deed. Confusing, isn't it? 

Key Takeaways

• Time travel is a science fiction trope that may possibly be technically possible. But, no one has achieved it.
• We do travel into the future all our lives, at a second per second. To do it faster requires technology we don't have.
• Travel to the past is also impossible at the present time.
• Is Time Travel Possible?| Explore , www.physics.org/article-questions.asp?id=131.
• NASA , NASA, spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/time-travel.html.
• “Time Travel.”  TV Tropes , tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TimeTravel.

Edited by Carolyn Collins Petersen .

• Is Time Travel Possible?
• Is Warp Drive From 'Star Trek' Possible?
• Learn About the True Speed of Light and How It's Used
• Can We Travel Through Time to the Past?
• What Is the Twin Paradox? Real Time Travel
• An Introduction to Black Holes
• Amazing Astronomy Facts
• Cosmic Rays
• Einstein's Theory of Relativity
• Learn about the Doppler Effect
• Should We Build a Moon Base?
• The Future of Human Space Exploration
• The History of Gravity
• Understanding Cosmology and Its Impact
• Can a Planet Make a Sound in Space?
• What are Rotation and Revolution?

Time travel is theoretically possible, calculations show. But that doesn't mean you could change the past.

• Time travel is possible based on the laws of physics, according to researchers.
• But time-travelers wouldn't be able to alter the past in a measurable way, they say. 
• And the future would essentially stay the same, according to the reseachers. 

Imagine you could hop into a time machine, press a button, and journey back to 2019, before the novel coronavirus made the leap from animals to humans.  

What if you could find and isolate patient zero? Theoretically, the COVID-19 pandemic wouldn't happen, right? 

Not quite, because then future-you wouldn't have decided to time travel in the first place.

For decades, physicists have been studying and debating versions of this paradox: If we could travel back in time and change the past, what would happen to the future?

A 2020 study offered a potential answer: Nothing.

"Events readjust around anything that could cause a paradox, so the paradox does not happen," Germain Tobar, the study's author previously told IFLScience .

Tobar's work, published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity in September 2020, suggests that according to the rules of theoretical physics, anything you tried to change in the past would be corrected by subsequent events.

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Put simply: It's theoretically possible to go back in time, but you couldn't change history.

The grandfather paradox

Physicists have considered time travel to be theoretically possible since Albert Einstein came up with his theory of relativity. Einstein's calculations suggest it's possible for an object in our universe to travel through space and time in a circular direction, eventually ending up at a point on its journey where it's been before – a path called a closed time-like curve.

Still, physicists continue to struggle with scenarios like the coronavirus example above, in which time-travelers alter events that already happened. The most famous example is known as the grandfather paradox: Say a time-traveler goes back to the past and kills a younger version of his or her grandfather. The grandfather then wouldn't have any children, erasing the time-traveler's parents and, of course, the time-traveler, too. But then who would kill Grandpa?

A take on this paradox appears in the movie "Back to the Future," when Marty McFly almost stops his parents from meeting in the past – potentially causing himself to disappear. 

To address the paradox, Tobar and his supervisor, Dr. Fabio Costa, used the "billiard-ball model," which imagines cause and effect as a series of colliding billiard balls, and a circular pool table as a closed time-like curve.

Imagine a bunch of billiard balls laid out across that circular table. If you push one ball from position X, it bangs around the table, hitting others in a particular pattern. 

The researchers calculated that even if you mess with the ball's pattern at some point in its journey, future interactions with other balls can correct its path, leading it to come back to the same position and speed that it would have had you not interfered.

"Regardless of the choice, the ball will fall into the same place," Dr Yasunori Nomura, a theoretical physicist at UC Berkeley, previously told Insider.

Tobar's model, in other words, says you could travel back in time, but you couldn't change how events unfolded significantly enough to alter the future, Nomura said. Applied to the grandfather paradox, then, this would mean that something would always get in the way of your attempt to kill your grandfather. Or at least by the time he did die, your grandmother would already be pregnant with your mother. 

Back to the coronavirus example. Let's say you were to travel back to 2019 and intervene in patient zero's life. According to Tobar's line of thinking, the pandemic would still happen somehow.

"You might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would," Tobar said, according to Australia's University of Queensland , where Tobar graduated from. 

Nomura said that although the model is too simple to represent the full range of cause and effect in our universe, it's a good starting point for future physicists.  

Watch: There are 2 types of time travel and physicists agree that one of them is possible

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February 1, 2006

How to Build a Time Machine

It wouldn't be easy, but it might be possible

By Paul Davies

Time travel has been a popular science-fiction theme since H. G. Wells wrote his celebrated novel The Time Machine in 1895. But can it really be done? Is it possible to build a machine that would transport a human being into the past or future?

For decades, time travel lay beyond the fringe of respectable science. In recent years, however, the topic has become something of a cottage industry among theoretical physicists. The motivation has been partly recreational--time travel is fun to think about. But this research has a serious side, too. Understanding the relation between cause and effect is a key part of attempts to construct a unified theory of physics. If unrestricted time travel were possible, even in principle, the nature of such a unified theory could be drastically affected.

Our best understanding of time comes from Einstein's theories of relativity. Prior to these theories, time was widely regarded as absolute and universal, the same for everyone no matter what their physical circumstances were. In his special theory of relativity, Einstein proposed that the measured interval between two events depends on how the observer is moving. Crucially, two observers who move differently will experience different durations between the same two events.

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The effect is often described using the twin paradox. Suppose that Sally and Sam are twins. Sally boards a rocket ship and travels at high speed to a nearby star, turns around and flies back to Earth, while Sam stays at home. For Sally the duration of the journey might be, say, one year, but when she returns and steps out of the spaceship, she finds that 10 years have elapsed on Earth. Her brother is now nine years older than she is. Sally and Sam are no longer the same age, despite the fact that they were born on the same day. This example illustrates a limited type of time travel. In effect, Sally has leaped nine years into Earth's future.

THE EFFECT, KNOWN AS time dilation, occurs whenever two observers move relative to each other. In daily life we don't notice weird time warps, because the effect becomes dramatic only when the motion occurs at close to the speed of light. Even at aircraft speeds, the time dilation in a typical journey amounts to just a few nanoseconds--hardly an adventure of Wellsian proportions. Nevertheless, atomic clocks are accurate enough to record the shift and confirm that time really is stretched by motion. So travel into the future is a proved fact, even if it has so far been in rather unexciting amounts.

To observe really dramatic time warps, one has to look beyond the realm of ordinary experience. Subatomic particles can be propelled at nearly the speed of light in large accelerator machines. Some of these particles, such as muons, have a built-in clock because they decay with a definite half-life; in accordance with Einstein's theory, fast-moving muons inside accelerators are observed to decay in slow motion. Some cosmic rays also experience spectacular time warps. These particles move so close to the speed of light that, from their point of view, they cross the galaxy in minutes, even though in Viewed from such a star, events here would resemble a fast-forwarded video. A black hole represents the ultimate time warp; at the surface of the hole, time stands still relative to Earth. This means that if you fell into a black hole from nearby, in the brief interval it took you to reach the surface, all of eternity would pass by in the wider universe. The region within the black hole is therefore beyond the end of time, as far as the outside universe is concerned. If an astronaut could zoom very close to a black hole and return unscathed--admittedly a fanciful, not to mention foolhardy, prospect--he could leap far into the future.

My Head Is Spinning

SO FAR I HAVE DISCUSSED travel forward in time. What about going backward? This is much more problematic. In 1948 Kurt Gdel of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., produced a solution of Einstein's gravitational field equations that described a rotating universe. In this universe, an astronaut could travel through space so as to reach his own past. This comes about because of the way gravity affects light. The rotation of the universe would drag light (and thus the causal relations between objects) around with it, enabling a material object to travel in a closed loop in space that is also a closed loop in time, without at any stage exceeding the speed of light in the immediate neighborhood of the particle. Gdel's solution was shrugged aside as a mathematical curiosity--after all, observations show no sign that the universe as a whole is spinning. His result served nonetheless to demonstrate that going back in time was not forbidden by the theory of relativity. Indeed, Einstein confessed that he was troubled by the thought that his theory might permit travel into the past under some circumstances.

Other scenarios have been found to permit travel into the past. For example, in 1974 Frank J. Tipler of Tulane University calculated that a massive, infinitely long cylinder spinning on its axis at near the speed of light could let astronauts visit their own past, again by dragging light around the cylinder into a loop. In 1991 J. Richard Gott of Princeton University predicted that cosmic strings--structures that cosmologists think were created in the early stages of the big bang--could produce similar results. But in the mid-1980s the most realistic scenario for a time machine emerged, based on the concept of a wormhole.

In science fiction, wormholes are sometimes called stargates; they offer a shortcut between two widely separated points in space. Jump through a hypothetical wormhole, and you might come out moments later on the other side of the galaxy. Wormholes naturally fit into the general theory of relativity, whereby gravity warps not only time but also space. The theory allows the analogue of alternative road and tunnel routes connecting two points in space. Mathematicians refer to such a space as multiply connected. Just as a tunnel passing under a hill can be shorter than the surface street, a wormhole may be shorter than the usual route through ordinary space.

The wormhole was used as a fictional device by Carl Sagan in his 1985 novel Contact . Prompted by Sagan, Kip S. Thorne and his co-workers at the California Institute of Technology set out to find whether wormholes were consistent with known physics. Their starting point was that a wormhole would resemble a black hole in being an object with fearsome gravity. But unlike a black hole, which offers a oneway journey to nowhere, a wormhole would have an exit as well as an entrance.

In the Loop

FOR THE WORMHOLE to be traversable, it must contain what Thorne termed exotic matter. In effect, this is something that will generate antigravity to combat the natural tendency of a massive system to implode into a black hole under its intense weight. Antigravity, or gravitational repulsion, can be generated by negative energy or pressure. Negative- energy states are known to exist in certain quantum systems, which suggests that Thorne's exotic matter is not ruled out by the laws of physics, although it is unclear whether enough antigravitating stuff can be assembled to stabilize a wormhole [see Negative Energy, Wormholes and Warp Drive, by Law rence H. Ford and Thomas A. Roman; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, January 2000].

Soon Thorne and his colleagues realized that if a stable worm hole could be created, then it could readily be turned into a time machine. An astronaut who passed through one might come out not only somewhere else in the universe but somewhen else, too--in either the future or the past.

To adapt the wormhole for time travel, one of its mouths could be towed to a neutron star and placed close to its surface. The gravity of the star would slow time near that wormhole mouth, so that a time difference between the ends of the wormhole would gradually accumulate. If both mouths were then parked at a convenient place in space, this time difference would remain frozen in.

Suppose the difference were 10 years. An astronaut passing through the wormhole in one direction would jump 10 years into the future, whereas an astronaut passing in the other direction would jump 10 years into the past. By returning to his starting point at high speed across ordinary space, the second astronaut might get back home before he left. In other words, a closed loop in space could become a loop in time as well. The one restriction is that the astronaut could not return to a time before the wormhole was first built.

A formidable problem that stands in the way of making a wormhole time machine is the creation of the wormhole in the first place. Possibly space is threaded with such structures naturally--relics of the big bang. If so, a supercivilization might commandeer one. Alternatively, wormholes might naturally come into existence on tiny scales, the so-called Planck length, about 20 factors of 10 as small as an atomic nucleus. In principle, such a minute wormhole could be stabilized by a pulse of energy and then somehow inflated to usable dimensions.

ASSUMING THAT the engineering problems could be overcome, the production of a time machine could open up a Pandora's box of causal paradoxes. Consider, for example, the time traveler who visits the past and murders his mother when she was a young girl. How do we make sense of this? If the girl dies, she cannot become the time traveler's mother. But if the time traveler was never born, he could not go back and murder his mother.

Paradoxes of this kind arise when the time traveler tries to change the past, which is obviously impossible. But that does not prevent someone from being a part of the past. Suppose the time traveler goes back and rescues a young girl from murder, and this girl grows up to become his mother. The causal loop is now self-consistent and no longer paradoxical. Causal consistency might impose restrictions on what a time traveler is able to do, but it does not rule out time travel per se.

The bizarre consequences of time travel have led some scientists to reject the notion outright. Stephen W. Hawking of the University of Cambridge has proposed a chronology protection conjecture, which would outlaw causal loops. Because the theory of relativity is known to permit causal loops, chronology protection would require some other factor to intercede to prevent travel into the past. What might this factor be? One suggestion is that quantum processes will come to the rescue. The existence of a time machine would allow particles to loop into their own past. Calculations hint that the ensuing disturbance would become self-reinforcing, creating a runaway surge of energy that would wreck the wormhole.

Chronology protection is still just a conjecture, so time travel remains a possibility. A final resolution of the matter may have to await the successful union of quantum mechanics and gravitation, perhaps through a theory such as string theory or its extension, so-called M-theory. It is even conceivable that the next generation of particle accelerators will be able to create subatomic wormholes that survive long enough for nearby particles to execute fleeting causal loops. This would be a far cry from Wells's vision of a time machine, but it would forever change our picture of physical reality.

PAUL DAVIES is a theoretical physicist and professor of natural philosophy at Macquarie University's Australian Center for Astrobiology in Sydney. He is one of the most prolific writers of popular-level books in physics. His scientific research interests include black holes, quantum field theory, the origin of the universe, the nature of consciousness and the origin of life.

Time travel: Is it possible?

Science says time travel is possible, but probably not in the way you're thinking.

Albert Einstein's theory

• General relativity and GPS
• Wormhole travel
• Alternate theories

Science fiction

Is time travel possible? Short answer: Yes, and you're doing it right now — hurtling into the future at the impressive rate of one second per second. 

You're pretty much always moving through time at the same speed, whether you're watching paint dry or wishing you had more hours to visit with a friend from out of town. 

But this isn't the kind of time travel that's captivated countless science fiction writers, or spurred a genre so extensive that Wikipedia lists over 400 titles in the category "Movies about Time Travel." In franchises like " Doctor Who ," " Star Trek ," and "Back to the Future" characters climb into some wild vehicle to blast into the past or spin into the future. Once the characters have traveled through time, they grapple with what happens if you change the past or present based on information from the future (which is where time travel stories intersect with the idea of parallel universes or alternate timelines). 

Related: The best sci-fi time machines ever

Although many people are fascinated by the idea of changing the past or seeing the future before it's due, no person has ever demonstrated the kind of back-and-forth time travel seen in science fiction or proposed a method of sending a person through significant periods of time that wouldn't destroy them on the way. And, as physicist Stephen Hawking pointed out in his book " Black Holes and Baby Universes" (Bantam, 1994), "The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future."

Science does support some amount of time-bending, though. For example, physicist Albert Einstein 's theory of special relativity proposes that time is an illusion that moves relative to an observer. An observer traveling near the speed of light will experience time, with all its aftereffects (boredom, aging, etc.) much more slowly than an observer at rest. That's why astronaut Scott Kelly aged ever so slightly less over the course of a year in orbit than his twin brother who stayed here on Earth. 

Related: Controversially, physicist argues that time is real

There are other scientific theories about time travel, including some weird physics that arise around wormholes , black holes and string theory . For the most part, though, time travel remains the domain of an ever-growing array of science fiction books, movies, television shows, comics, video games and more. 

Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905. Along with his later expansion, the theory of general relativity , it has become one of the foundational tenets of modern physics. Special relativity describes the relationship between space and time for objects moving at constant speeds in a straight line. 

The short version of the theory is deceptively simple. First, all things are measured in relation to something else — that is to say, there is no "absolute" frame of reference. Second, the speed of light is constant. It stays the same no matter what, and no matter where it's measured from. And third, nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

From those simple tenets unfolds actual, real-life time travel. An observer traveling at high velocity will experience time at a slower rate than an observer who isn't speeding through space. 

While we don't accelerate humans to near-light-speed, we do send them swinging around the planet at 17,500 mph (28,160 km/h) aboard the International Space Station . Astronaut Scott Kelly was born after his twin brother, and fellow astronaut, Mark Kelly . Scott Kelly spent 520 days in orbit, while Mark logged 54 days in space. The difference in the speed at which they experienced time over the course of their lifetimes has actually widened the age gap between the two men.

"So, where[as] I used to be just 6 minutes older, now I am 6 minutes and 5 milliseconds older," Mark Kelly said in a panel discussion on July 12, 2020, Space.com previously reported . "Now I've got that over his head."

General relativity and GPS time travel

The difference that low earth orbit makes in an astronaut's life span may be negligible — better suited for jokes among siblings than actual life extension or visiting the distant future — but the dilation in time between people on Earth and GPS satellites flying through space does make a difference. 

Read more: Can we stop time?

The Global Positioning System , or GPS, helps us know exactly where we are by communicating with a network of a few dozen satellites positioned in a high Earth orbit. The satellites circle the planet from 12,500 miles (20,100 kilometers) away, moving at 8,700 mph (14,000 km/h). 

According to special relativity, the faster an object moves relative to another object, the slower that first object experiences time. For GPS satellites with atomic clocks, this effect cuts 7 microseconds, or 7 millionths of a second, off each day, according to the American Physical Society publication Physics Central .  

Read more: Could Star Trek's faster-than-light warp drive actually work?

Then, according to general relativity, clocks closer to the center of a large gravitational mass like Earth tick more slowly than those farther away. So, because the GPS satellites are much farther from the center of Earth compared to clocks on the surface, Physics Central added, that adds another 45 microseconds onto the GPS satellite clocks each day. Combined with the negative 7 microseconds from the special relativity calculation, the net result is an added 38 microseconds. 

This means that in order to maintain the accuracy needed to pinpoint your car or phone — or, since the system is run by the U.S. Department of Defense, a military drone — engineers must account for an extra 38 microseconds in each satellite's day. The atomic clocks onboard don’t tick over to the next day until they have run 38 microseconds longer than comparable clocks on Earth.

Given those numbers, it would take more than seven years for the atomic clock in a GPS satellite to un-sync itself from an Earth clock by more than a blink of an eye. (We did the math: If you estimate a blink to last at least 100,000 microseconds, as the Harvard Database of Useful Biological Numbers does, it would take thousands of days for those 38 microsecond shifts to add up.) 

This kind of time travel may seem as negligible as the Kelly brothers' age gap, but given the hyper-accuracy of modern GPS technology, it actually does matter. If it can communicate with the satellites whizzing overhead, your phone can nail down your location in space and time with incredible accuracy. 

Can wormholes take us back in time?

General relativity might also provide scenarios that could allow travelers to go back in time, according to NASA . But the physical reality of those time-travel methods is no piece of cake. 

Wormholes are theoretical "tunnels" through the fabric of space-time that could connect different moments or locations in reality to others. Also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges or white holes, as opposed to black holes, speculation about wormholes abounds. But despite taking up a lot of space (or space-time) in science fiction, no wormholes of any kind have been identified in real life. 

Related: Best time travel movies

"The whole thing is very hypothetical at this point," Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon, told Space.com sister site Live Science . "No one thinks we're going to find a wormhole anytime soon."

Primordial wormholes are predicted to be just 10^-34 inches (10^-33 centimeters) at the tunnel's "mouth". Previously, they were expected to be too unstable for anything to be able to travel through them. However, a study claims that this is not the case, Live Science reported . 

The theory, which suggests that wormholes could work as viable space-time shortcuts, was described by physicist Pascal Koiran. As part of the study, Koiran used the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, as opposed to the Schwarzschild metric which has been used in the majority of previous analyses.

In the past, the path of a particle could not be traced through a hypothetical wormhole. However, using the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, the physicist was able to achieve just that.

Koiran's paper was described in October 2021, in the preprint database arXiv , before being published in the Journal of Modern Physics D.

Alternate time travel theories

While Einstein's theories appear to make time travel difficult, some researchers have proposed other solutions that could allow jumps back and forth in time. These alternate theories share one major flaw: As far as scientists can tell, there's no way a person could survive the kind of gravitational pulling and pushing that each solution requires.

Infinite cylinder theory

Astronomer Frank Tipler proposed a mechanism (sometimes known as a Tipler Cylinder ) where one could take matter that is 10 times the sun's mass, then roll it into a very long, but very dense cylinder. The Anderson Institute , a time travel research organization, described the cylinder as "a black hole that has passed through a spaghetti factory."

After spinning this black hole spaghetti a few billion revolutions per minute, a spaceship nearby — following a very precise spiral around the cylinder — could travel backward in time on a "closed, time-like curve," according to the Anderson Institute. 

The major problem is that in order for the Tipler Cylinder to become reality, the cylinder would need to be infinitely long or be made of some unknown kind of matter. At least for the foreseeable future, endless interstellar pasta is beyond our reach.

Time donuts

Theoretical physicist Amos Ori at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, proposed a model for a time machine made out of curved space-time — a donut-shaped vacuum surrounded by a sphere of normal matter.

"The machine is space-time itself," Ori told Live Science . "If we were to create an area with a warp like this in space that would enable time lines to close on themselves, it might enable future generations to return to visit our time."

Amos Ori is a theoretical physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. His research interests and publications span the fields of general relativity, black holes, gravitational waves and closed time lines.

There are a few caveats to Ori's time machine. First, visitors to the past wouldn't be able to travel to times earlier than the invention and construction of the time donut. Second, and more importantly, the invention and construction of this machine would depend on our ability to manipulate gravitational fields at will — a feat that may be theoretically possible but is certainly beyond our immediate reach.

Time travel has long occupied a significant place in fiction. Since as early as the "Mahabharata," an ancient Sanskrit epic poem compiled around 400 B.C., humans have dreamed of warping time, Lisa Yaszek, a professor of science fiction studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told Live Science .  

Every work of time-travel fiction creates its own version of space-time, glossing over one or more scientific hurdles and paradoxes to achieve its plot requirements. 

Some make a nod to research and physics, like " Interstellar ," a 2014 film directed by Christopher Nolan. In the movie, a character played by Matthew McConaughey spends a few hours on a planet orbiting a supermassive black hole, but because of time dilation, observers on Earth experience those hours as a matter of decades. 

Others take a more whimsical approach, like the "Doctor Who" television series. The series features the Doctor, an extraterrestrial "Time Lord" who travels in a spaceship resembling a blue British police box. "People assume," the Doctor explained in the show, "that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff." 

Long-standing franchises like the "Star Trek" movies and television series, as well as comic universes like DC and Marvel Comics, revisit the idea of time travel over and over. 

Related: Marvel movies in order: chronological & release order

Here is an incomplete (and deeply subjective) list of some influential or notable works of time travel fiction:

Books about time travel:

• Rip Van Winkle (Cornelius S. Van Winkle, 1819) by Washington Irving
• A Christmas Carol (Chapman & Hall, 1843) by Charles Dickens
• The Time Machine (William Heinemann, 1895) by H. G. Wells
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Charles L. Webster and Co., 1889) by Mark Twain
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Pan Books, 1980) by Douglas Adams
• A Tale of Time City (Methuen, 1987) by Diana Wynn Jones
• The Outlander series (Delacorte Press, 1991-present) by Diana Gabaldon
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury/Scholastic, 1999) by J. K. Rowling
• Thief of Time (Doubleday, 2001) by Terry Pratchett
• The Time Traveler's Wife (MacAdam/Cage, 2003) by Audrey Niffenegger
• All You Need is Kill (Shueisha, 2004) by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Movies about time travel:

• Planet of the Apes (1968)
• Superman (1978)
• Time Bandits (1981)
• The Terminator (1984)
• Back to the Future series (1985, 1989, 1990)
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)
• Groundhog Day (1993)
• Galaxy Quest (1999)
• The Butterfly Effect (2004)
• 13 Going on 30 (2004)
• The Lake House (2006)
• Meet the Robinsons (2007)
• Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
• Midnight in Paris (2011)
• Looper (2012)
• X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
• Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
• Interstellar (2014)
• Doctor Strange (2016)
• A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
• The Last Sharknado: It's About Time (2018)
• Avengers: Endgame (2019)
• Tenet (2020)
• Palm Springs (2020)
• Zach Snyder's Justice League (2021)
• The Tomorrow War (2021)

Television about time travel:

• Doctor Who (1963-present)
• The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) (multiple episodes)
• Star Trek (multiple series, multiple episodes)
• Samurai Jack (2001-2004)
• Lost (2004-2010)
• Phil of the Future (2004-2006)
• Steins;Gate (2011)
• Outlander (2014-2023)
• Loki (2021-present)

Games about time travel:

• Chrono Trigger (1995)
• TimeSplitters (2000-2005)
• Kingdom Hearts (2002-2019)
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2003)
• God of War II (2007)
• Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack In Time (2009)
• Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (2013)
• Dishonored 2 (2016)
• Titanfall 2 (2016)
• Outer Wilds (2019)

Additional resources

Explore physicist Peter Millington's thoughts about Stephen Hawking's time travel theories at The Conversation . Check out a kid-friendly explanation of real-world time travel from NASA's Space Place . For an overview of time travel in fiction and the collective consciousness, read " Time Travel: A History " (Pantheon, 2016) by James Gleik. 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

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Ailsa is a staff writer for How It Works magazine, where she writes science, technology, space, history and environment features. Based in the U.K., she graduated from the University of Stirling with a BA (Hons) journalism degree. Previously, Ailsa has written for Cardiff Times magazine, Psychology Now and numerous science bookazines. 

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Time travel for travelers? It’s tricky.

Scientific theories suggest it’s possible to travel through time. But the reality isn’t so clear.

Time travel has fascinated scientists and writers for at least 125 years. The concept feels especially intriguing now, when physical travel is limited. Here, a photo illustration of Tokyo’s Robot Restaurant captures the idea of speeding through time.

I’m stuck at home, you’re stuck at home, we’re all stuck at home. Jetting off to some fun-filled destination like we used to might not be in the cards for a little while yet. But what about travelling through time? And not just the boring way, where we wait for the future to arrive one second at a time. What if you could zip through time at will, travelling forward to the future or backward to the past as easily as pushing buttons on the dashboard of a souped-up DeLorean, just like in the movie Back to the Future ?

Time travel has been a fantasy for at least 125 years. H.G. Wells penned his groundbreaking novel, The Time Machine , in 1895, and it’s something that physicists and philosophers have been writing serious papers about for almost a century.

What really kick-started scientific investigations into time travel was the notion, dating to the closing years of the 19th century, that time could be envisioned as a dimension, just like space. We can move easily enough through space, so why not time?

At the end of the 19th century, scientists thought of time as a dimension like space, where travelers can go anywhere they want. This photo illustration of Tokyu Plaza in Tokyo’s Omotesando Harajuku evokes the feeling of visiting endless destinations.

“In space, you can go wherever you want, so maybe in time you can similarly go anywhere you want,” says Nikk Effingham, a philosopher at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom . “From there, it’s a short step to time machines.”

( Why are people obsessed with time travel? Best-selling author James Gleick has some ideas .)

Dueling theories

Wells was a novelist, not a physicist, but physics would soon catch up. In 1905, Albert Einstein published the first part of his relativity theory, known as special relativity . In it, space and time are malleable; measurements of both space and time depend on the relative speed of the person doing the measuring.

A few years later, the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski showed that, in Einstein’s theory, space and time could be thought of as two aspects of a single four-dimensional entity known as space-time . Then, in 1915, Einstein came up with the second part of his theory, known as general relativity . General relativity renders gravity in a new light: Instead of thinking of it as a force, general relativity describes gravity as a bending or warping of space-time.

But special relativity is enough to get us started in terms of moving through time. The theory “establishes that time is much more similar to space than we had previously thought,” says Clifford Johnson, a physicist at the University of Southern California. “So maybe everything we can do with space, we can do with time.”

Well, almost everything. Special relativity doesn’t give us a way of going back in time, but it does give us a way of going forward— and at a rate that you can actually control. In fact, thanks to special relativity, you can end up with two twins having different ages, the famous “twin paradox.”

Suppose you head off to the Alpha Centauri star system in your spaceship at a really high speed (something close to the speed of light), while your twin remains on Earth. When you come back home, you’ll find you’re now much younger than your twin. It’s counterintuitive, to say the least, but the physics, after more than a century, is rock solid.

“It is absolutely provable in special relativity that the astronaut who makes the journey, if they travel at very nearly the speed of light, will be much younger than their twin when they come back,” says Janna Levin, a physicist at Barnard College in New York . Interestingly, time appears to pass just as it always does for both twins; it’s only when they’re reunited that the difference reveals itself.

Maybe you were both in your 20s when the voyage began. When you come back, you look just a few years older than when you left, while your twin is perhaps now a grandparent. “My experience of the passage of time is utterly normal for me. My clocks tick at the normal rate, I age normally, movies run at the right pace,” says Levin. “I’m no further into my future than normal. But I’ve travelled into my twin’s future.”

( To study aging, scientist are looking to outer space .)

With general relativity, things really start to get interesting. In this theory, a massive object warps or distorts space and time. Perhaps you’ve seen diagrams or videos comparing this to the way a ball distorts a rubber sheet . One result is that, just as travelling at a high speed affects the rate at which time passes, simply being near a really heavy object—like a black hole —will affect one’s experience of time. (This trick was central to the plot of the 2014 film, Interstellar , in which Matthew McConaughey’s character spends time in the vicinity of a massive black hole. When he returns home, he finds that his young daughter is now elderly.)

To get around the “grandfather paradox,” some scientists theorize there could be multiple timelines. In these images of Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, Japan, time seems to pass at different rates.

But black holes are just the beginning. Physicists have also speculated about the implications of a much more exotic structure known as a wormhole . Wormholes, if they exist, could connect one location in space-time with another. An astronaut who enters a wormhole in the Andromeda Galaxy in the year 3000 might find herself emerging from the other end in our own galaxy, in the year 2000. But there’s a catch: While we have overwhelming evidence that black holes exist in nature—astronomers even photographed one last year—wormholes are far more speculative.

“You can imagine building a bridge from one region of space-time to another region of space-time,” explains Levin, “but it would require kinds of mass and energy that we don’t really know exist in reality, things like negative energy.” She says it’s “mathematically conceivable” that structures such as wormholes could exist, but they may not be part of physical reality.

There’s also the troubling question of what happens to our notions of cause and effect if backward time travel were possible. The most famous of these conundrums is the so-called “ grandfather paradox .” Suppose you travel back in time to when your grandfather was a young man. You kill him (perhaps by accident), which means your parent won’t be born, which means you won’t be born. Therefore, you won’t be able to travel through time and kill your grandfather.

Multiple timelines?

Over the years, physicists and philosophers have pondered various resolutions to the grandfather paradox. One possibility is that the paradox simply proves that no such journeys are possible; the laws of physics, somehow, must prevent backward time travel. This was the view of the late physicist Stephen Hawking , who called this rule the “ chronology protection conjecture .” (Mind you, he never specified the actual physics behind such a rule.)

But there are also other, more intriguing, solutions. Maybe backward time travel is possible, and yet time travelers can’t change the past, no matter how hard they try. Effingham, whose book Time Travel: Probability and Impossibility was published earlier this year, puts it this way: “You might shoot the wrong person, or you might change your mind. Or, you might shoot the person you think is your grandfather, but it turns out your grandmother had an affair with the milkman, and that’s who your grandfather was all along; you just didn’t know it.”

Which also means the much-discussed fantasy of killing Hitler before the outbreak of World War II is a non-starter. “It’s impossible because it didn’t happen,” says Fabio Costa, a theoretical physicist at the University of Queensland in Australia . “It’s not even a question. We know how history developed. There is no re-do.”

In fact, suggests Effingham, if you can’t change the past, then a time traveler probably can’t do anything . Your mere existence at a time in which you never existed would be a contradiction. “The universe doesn’t care whether the thing you’ve changed is that you’ve killed Hitler, or that you moved an atom from position A to position B,” Effingham says.

But all is not lost. The scenarios Effingham and Costa are imagining involve a single universe with a single “timeline.” But some physicists speculate that our universe is just one among many . If that’s the case, then perhaps time travelers who visit the past can do as they please, which would shed new light on the grandfather paradox.

( The Big Bang could have led to the creation of multiple universes, scientists say .)

“Maybe, for whatever reason, you decide to go back and commit this crime [of killing your grandfather], and so the world ‘branches off’ into two different realities,” says Levin. As a result, “even though you seem to be altering your past, you’re not really altering it; you’re creating a new history.” (This idea of multiple timelines lies at the heart of the Back to the Future movie trilogy. In contrast, in the movie 12 Monkeys , Bruce Willis’s character makes multiple journeys through time, but everything plays out along a single timeline.)

More work to be done

What everyone seems to agree on is that no one is building a time-travelling DeLorean or engineering a custom-built wormhole anytime soon. Instead, physicists are focusing on completing the work that Einstein began a century ago.

After more than 100 years, no one has figured out how to reconcile general relativity with the other great pillar of 20th century physics: quantum mechanics . Some physicists believe that a long-sought unified theory known as quantum gravity will yield new insight into the nature of time. At the very least, says Levin, it seems likely “that we need to go beyond just general relativity to understand time.”

Meanwhile, it’s no surprise that, like H.G. Wells, we continue to daydream about having the freedom to move through time just as we move through space. “Time is embedded in everything we do,” says Johnson. “It looms large in how we perceive the world. So being able to mess with time—I’m not surprised we’re obsessed with that, and fantasize about it.”

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How Back To The Future's Time Travel Works

If you read the words “time travel” on a site like CinemaBlend, you can almost be assured that one thing will instantly come to mind. With the smell of burnt rubber and a familiar twinkle of well-worn musical notes, you can bet that the Back to the Future trilogy is one of those things that almost immediately presents itself in the pop culture consciousness. But we’re not here to talk about whether or not Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s landmark sci-fi trilogy is good, we already know the original is one of the best sci-fi movies of all time. No, we’re here to talk about something much more important: how the time travel in the world of Doc Brown and Marty McFly actually works.

Better still, this academic exercise in temporal studies will open the door to even more examinations in how time travel works at the movies. Just as we’ve previously discussed with Avengers: Endgame , the subject of traveling through the past, present, and future of any given timeline is going to be something we’re going to invest a lot of time into. So if you like what you see here, there’s a great big beautiful tomorrow and/or yesterday waiting for you after! For now though, let’s go back… to the past, present, and future of Hill Valley, California!

The Time Travel In Back To The Future

Now, you can stop me if you’ve heard this story before, as Back to the Future itself has turned 35 this very year. However, a refresher is always a good idea when it comes to the moving pieces that you’ll see moving through the story of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s legendary sci-fi trilogy. So here’s a quick and basic rundown of what happened throughout the Back to the Future saga:

Who's Time Traveling

Throughout the course of three movies, we see Einstein the Dog, Marty McFly (Sr), Doctor Emmett L. Brown, Jennifer Parker, Biff Tannen, and Clara Clayton all zoom back and forth through time. Oh, don’t forget Jules and Verne, Doc and Clara’s kids. This concerns them too, though just barely.

From When To When

For the intents and purposes of the Back to the Future series, “the present day” is 1985. From that particular point on the timeline, the Back to the Future trilogy’s time travel adventures span between the final film’s trip to 1885 to the then far flung future of 2015 . Two stops in 1955 and a trip to alternate 1985 also take place, because who would have thought time travel was such a dangerous, life altering thing?

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The Purpose Of Their Trip

It all started with a science experiment in Back to the Future , which saw Doc Brown testing his time machine to see if it’d work. But then, Marty McFly accidentally goes back to 1955, and has to correct the mistake of throwing off his parent’s first meeting and falling in love. That’s a simple enough beginning, but then Marty has a double shot of intentional time travel adventures, as Back to the Future Part II starts with Doc bringing Marty and Jennifer to 2015 to save their kids from going to jail, but leads to having to correct old Biff Tannen’s betting streak starting in 1955, and preventing Doc from being murdered by Mad Dog Tannen in 1885. Last, but not least, Marty has to go home to 1985 when all is said and done; because the time continuum.

How Time Travel Happens In Back To the Future

The two main methods of travel in Back to the Future’s trilogy are a converted DeLorean and a converted locomotive. Both vehicles, whether through nuclear radiation, burning garbage, or steam power, need to get to 88 miles per hour, and generate a charge of 1.21 Gigawatts in order to do the thing. When your vehicle of choice hits those milestones, you’re going to see some serious shit… time travel shit!

One very important thing to keep in mind is you need to be mindful of where you’re travelling. The exact spot you’re traveling from is where you’ll arrive when you reach the date of your destination, and what was once a mall parking lot in 1985 could be a pine tree farm in 1955. Hover conversion is recommended, so that whenever and wherever you’re going, you won’t need roads. And thanks to some script changes early on in the franchise’s history, you won’t need Coca Cola either!

Can History Be Changed As A Result Of Time Travel In Back to the Future?

Oh boy, can it. Throughout Back to the Future history, we’ve seen the McFly kids almost wiped out of existence, Doc Brown almost murdered over a simple amount of money, and an entirely different 1985 where Biff Tannen runs Hill Valley, and is rich beyond his wildest dreams. There is a lot of history that’s almost changed in the Back to the Future saga. However, some pieces of history do change permanently, and for the better. One of the most classic examples of the perils of time travel, the Back to the Future trilogy is a single timeline, rewritten as events progress.

Artifacts like photographs, faxes, and matchbooks change as quickly as events are being changed in the timeline. So the better your chances of seeing an event come to pass, the longer that evidence is going to stick around. See also: Jennifer’s fax from Back to the Future Part II surviving until the end of Back to the Future Part III , when a newly wisened Marty rewrites his future by not engaging in 1985’s fateful drag race.

What Are The Consequences Of Time Travel In Back To The Future?

While Back to the Future’s time travel was a messy affair, the end result could be seen as a net positive. And the consequences present themselves in very similar scenarios that hit three main characters in pretty unique ways.

Doc's Consequences

As Doc Brown, his wife Clara, and their sons Jules and Verne are still traveling through the whole of space and time in their souped up locomotive, this could lead to even more chaos throughout the timeline. That’s great for a film and media franchise, but that’s horrible if you want to sleep at night knowing you won’t have to adjust for a consequences of an accidentally generated tangent timeline. Still, Doc got a happy ending, finally finding himself bound to a family he never even knew he wanted until he met Clara, whisking her away to be his companion for all of time and space. Now, why does that sound so familiar ?

Marty's Consequences

Seeing the consequences of the actions his children, his enemies, and even his own self take in their lifetimes, he learns to have more confidence in himself. Marty, much like Doc, found himself a changed man, in relationships that will keep him grounded. But learning not to give in to his more impulsive nature, and to turn the cheek when called a chicken, puts Marty on the presumed path to success as a musician; instead of the working stiff he’d have become if he got into the accident with the Rolls Royce. Like famed science fiction author/father George McFly once said, when you put your mind to it… you can accomplish anything. Which brings us to the evolution of Marty’s father being one of the lynchpins of the Back to the Future series’ altered history.

George McFly's Consequences

George McFly never traveled through time, but he certainly benefited from time travel.

When George McFly and Lorraine Baines first meet, their relationship begins out of pity after he falls out of a tree… while trying to creep on an undressing Lorraine. The course of their love runs in a safe and predictable manner, with a first kiss acting as the highlight to their steady but waning romance. However, once Marty helps his young father discover confidence, and thanks to the timeline presenting George with the opportunity to dethrone Biff Tannen as the big dog, the new George and Lorraine McFly are a pair of lovers that embrace romance and confidence. Proving that so long as you follow the rules of time travel, and know how to play a ripping guitar solo 30 years before it’s ever invented, you too could change the future for the better.

Let's Do Another One!

So there you have it: the world of Back to the Future’s time travel explained, in a simple guide! It’s a process that’s so much fun, we here at CinemaBlend are dedicating ourselves to keeping this subject going. Time travel is a well-beloved staple in sci-fi, and with so many variants on the subject, it’s a handy topic to be an expert on… just in case you find yourself somewhere, or some time, you don’t belong.

If there’s any particular time travel stories you’d like to send to our labs for deconstruction, feel free to suggest them in the comments below! As for the next time you’ll see us in the mood for time travel, it feels like a good time for a Star Trek! And dear readers, if you thought we went on a tangent about tangent timelines this time out, just wait until we break down one of the most iconic installments of that series, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home .

Though that could always change, as the timeline could always skew in the course of events between here and now. Wibbley wobbley, timey wimey… stuff always comes up, and you never know where or when you’ll be until you get there. So until our next meeting, don’t swipe any sports almanacs, and if a crazy wild-eyed scientist or a kid show up asking about this write up, send them our way. We’ve got some further questions we need to ask them. See you in the future!

Mike Reyes is the Senior Movie Contributor at CinemaBlend, though that title’s more of a guideline really. Passionate about entertainment since grade school, the movies have always held a special place in his life, which explains his current occupation. Mike graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science, but swore off of running for public office a long time ago. Mike's expertise ranges from James Bond to everything Alita, making for a brilliantly eclectic resume. He fights for the user.

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SpaceX Blazes Forward With Latest Starship Launch

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SpaceX Launches Starship for Third Time

The rocket, a version of which will eventually carry nasa astronauts to the moon, traveled almost halfway around the earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere..

“Five, four, three, two, three, one.” “This point, we’ve already passed through Max-Q, maximum dynamic pressure. And passing supersonic, so we’re now moving faster than the speed of sound. Getting those on-board views from the ship cameras. Boosters now making its way back, seeing six engines ignited on ship. Kate, we got a Starship on its way to space and a booster on the way back to the Gulf.” “Oh, man. I need a moment to pick my jaw up from the floor because these views are just stunning.”

By Kenneth Chang

• March 14, 2024

The third try turned out to be closer to the charm for Elon Musk and SpaceX, as his company’s mammoth Starship rocket launched on Thursday and traveled about halfway around the Earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere.

The test flight achieved several key milestones in the development of the vehicle, which could alter the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the moon.

This particular flight was not, by design, intended to make it all the way around the Earth. At 8:25 a.m. Central time, Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever to fly — lifted off from the coast of South Texas. The ascent was smooth, with the upper Starship stage reaching orbital velocities. About 45 minutes after launch, it started re-entering the atmosphere, heading toward a belly-flop splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Live video, conveyed in near real-time via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites , showed red-hot gases heating the underside of the vehicle. Then, 49 minutes after launch, communications with Starship ended, and SpaceX later said the vehicle had not survived the re-entry, presumably disintegrating and falling into the ocean.

Even so, Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, congratulated SpaceX on what he called a “successful test flight” of the system his agency is counting on for some of its Artemis lunar missions.

SpaceX aims to make both the vehicle’s lower rocket booster and the upper spacecraft stage capable of flying over and over again — a stark contrast to the single-launch throwaway rockets that have been used for most of the space age.

That reusability gives SpaceX the potential to drive down the cost of lofting satellites and telescopes, as well as people and the things they need to live in space.

Completing most of the short jaunt was a reassuring validation that the rocket’s design appears to be sound. Not only is Starship crucial for NASA’s lunar plans, it is the key to Mr. Musk’s pipe dream of sending people to live on Mars.

For Mr. Musk, the success also harks back to his earlier reputation as a technological visionary who led breakthrough advances at Tesla and SpaceX, a contrast with his troubled purchase of Twitter and the polarizing social media quagmire that has followed since he transformed the platform and renamed it X. Even as SpaceX launched its next-generation rocket, the social media company was dueling with Don Lemon , a former CNN anchor who was sharing clips from a combative interview with Mr. Musk.

SpaceX still needs to pull off a series of formidable rocketry firsts before Starship is ready to head to the moon and beyond. Earlier this week, Mr. Musk said he hoped for at least six more Starship flights this year, during which some of those experiments may occur.

But if it achieves them all, the company could again revolutionize the space transportation business and leave competitors far behind.

Phil Larson, a White House space adviser during the Obama administration who also previously worked on communication efforts at SpaceX, said Starship’s size and reusability had “massive potential to change the game in transportation to orbit. And it could enable whole new classes of missions.”

NASA is counting on Starship to serve as the lunar lander for Artemis III, a mission that will take astronauts to the surface of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. That journey is currently scheduled for late 2026 but seems likely to slide to 2027 or later.

The third flight was a marked improvement from the first two launch attempts.

Last April, Starship made it off the launchpad, but a cascade of engine failures and fires in the booster led to the rocket’s destruction 24 miles above the Gulf of Mexico.

In November, the second Starship launch traveled much farther. All 33 engines in the Super Heavy booster worked properly during ascent, and after a successful separation, the upper Starship stage nearly made it to orbital velocities. However, both stages ended up exploding.

Nonetheless, Mr. Musk hailed both test flights as successes, as they provided data that helped engineers improve the design.

Thursday’s launch — which coincided with the 22nd anniversary of the founding of SpaceX — occurred 85 minutes into a 110-minute launch window. The 33 engines in the booster ignited at the launch site outside Brownsville, Texas, and lifted the rocket, which was as tall as a 40-story building, into the morning sky.

Most of the flight proceeded smoothly, and a number of test objectives were achieved during the flight, like opening and closing the spacecraft’s payload doors, which will be needed to deliver cargo in the future.

SpaceX did not attempt to recover the booster this time, but did have it perform engine burns that will be needed to return to the launch site. However, the final landing burn for the booster, conducted over the Gulf of Mexico, did not fully succeed — an area that SpaceX will attempt to fix for future flights.

SpaceX said the Super Heavy disintegrated at an altitude of about 1,500 feet.

SpaceX engineers will also have to figure out why Starship did not survive re-entry and make fixes to the design of the vehicle.

Even with the partial success of Thursday’s flight, Starship is far from ready to go to Mars, or even the moon. Because of Mr. Musk’s ambitions for Mars, Starship is much larger and much more complicated than what NASA needs for its Artemis moon landings. For Artemis III, two astronauts are to spend about a week in the South Pole region of the moon.

“He had the low price,” Daniel Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former high-level official at NASA, said of Mr. Musk, “and NASA chose to take the risk associated with that configuration hoping that it would work out. And we’ll see if that turns out to be true.”

To leave Earth’s orbit, Starship must have its propellant tanks refilled with liquid methane and liquid oxygen. That will require a complex choreography of additional Starship launches to take the propellants to orbit.

“This is a complicated, complicated problem, and there’s a lot that has to get sorted out, and a lot that has to work right,” Mr. Dumbacher said.

Thursday’s flight included an early test of that technology, moving liquid oxygen from one tank to another within Starship.

Mr. Dumbacher does not expect Starship to be ready by September 2026, the launch date NASA currently has for Artemis III, although he would not predict how much of a delay there might be. “I’m not going to give you a guess because there is way too much work, way too many problems to solve,” he said.

Kenneth Chang , a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth. More about Kenneth Chang

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March 19, 2024

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Using 'time travel' to think about technology from the perspective of future generations

by Osaka University

The world approaches an environmental tipping point, and our decisions now regarding energy, resources, and the environment will have profound consequences for the future. Despite this, most sustainable thought tends to be limited to the viewpoint of current generations.

In a study published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change , researchers from Osaka University have revealed that adopting the perspective of "imaginary future generations" (IFGs) can yield fascinating insights into long-term social and technological trends.

The researchers organized a series of four workshops at Osaka University, with participants drawn from the faculty and student body of the Graduate School of Engineering. The workshops discussed the state of future society and manufacturing in general, and also looked at one technology in particular: hydrothermally produced porous glass.

During the workshops, the participants were asked to think about this technology from the perspective of IFGs, to imagine how this technology might be adopted in the future and to assess its future potentiality.

"We chose hydrothermally produced porous glass for the case study because of the generational trade-offs involved," says lead author of the study Keishiro Hara. "Porous glass is incredibly useful as either a filter for removing impurities or an insulator for buildings. Also, it can be recycled into new porous glass more or less indefinitely.

"The problem is that making it takes a lot of energy—both to pulverize waste glass and to heat water to very high temperatures. There's a striking trade-off between costs now and gains in the future."

In the workshops, the participants first looked at issues involving society and manufacturing from the perspective of the present and were then asked to imagine themselves in the shoes of their counterparts in 2040.

"The future the participants imagined was quite different from the future as seen from the perspective of the current generation ," explains Toshihiro Tanaka, senior author. "Most groups described a future in which sustainability has become a central concern for society. Meanwhile, advances in renewal energy mean that energy is abundant, as are resources, as frontiers such as the moon and deep ocean are opened to exploration.

"In this context, hydrothermally produced porous glass comes into its own as a sustainable way to recycle glass, and the energy needed to produce it is readily available."

The participants were surveyed between workshops and asked to rank indicators related to the future potentiality of the technology. Interestingly, these rankings looked quite different after the workshops in which the participants were asked to take on the perspective of "imaginary future generations."

"We noticed that when the 'imaginary future generations' method, which has been proven to be effective in facilitating long-term thinking, was adopted, participants perceived the feasibility of this technology differently, and their adoption scenarios changed accordingly," says Hara.

The study suggests that the simple act of putting ourselves in the position of future generations may provide new perspectives on issues of sustainability and technology, helping us to rethink our priorities and set new directions for research and development.

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Here's What TSA's New Self-Screening Looks Like In Vegas

For those who have TSA PreCheck, Harry Reid International Airport has some new screening technology to help with time spent in security lines.

• Harry Reid International Airport introduces an Innovation Checkpoint to speed up TSA security screening for PreCheck passengers.
• The new self-service screening process removes the need for passengers to interact directly with TSA officers at the airport.
• TSA officers will not lose their jobs due to the self-screening process, instead focusing on broader security concerns during screenings.

With air travel returning to pre-COVID levels, airports are busier than ever. Gone are the days of getting to the airport any less than two hours in advance and being able to sail through ticket counters and TSA security lines. Now, it can take longer than two hours to navigate lines successfully before tackling the journey from TSA to the gate for takeoff.

The reason that the process is so painfully long has to do with the procedures TSA must complete to get passengers through security. Despite the TSA having the same rules for over 20 years, some passengers still fail to comply with what is required of them and bring on items they should not . Others simply take longer when it comes to getting their items into the gray bins, taking their shoes and other items off before going through the metal detector, all of which takes extra time to get through security.

In a move to get more passengers to sign up for and see how useful TSA PreCheck is , major airports throughout the nation have been implementing Touchless ID . This allows passengers to go through the ticket counter and security without needing to speak with anyone at the airport, which has significantly decreased the amount of time it takes to get through security. The Harry Reid International Airport is expanding this process to allow passengers to get through the screening process at their own pace without having to speak to anyone.

Here is what TSA's new self-screening looks like in Vegas.

10 Hotels Near Las Vegas Airport For An Easy & Convenient Stay

What the new tsa self-screening looks like, the innovation checkpoint is a "futuristic-looking baggage and personal belongings inspection system".

On March 5, 2024, Harry Reid International Airport began using a new interface to get TSA PreCheck passengers through security. This interface, called the Innovation Checkpoint, requires passengers with the PreCheck status to speak English. This is because screens with instructions about how to get through the screening process smoothly are present at the checkpoint.

The process should take passengers no more than 10 minutes to get through , a big savings of time considering that those who are not PreCheck passengers spend 30 or more minutes in line waiting to get through security.

Where the current security, with its conveyor belt and gray containers, has been replaced by a "futuristic-looking baggage and personal belongings inspection system" that has an automated belt with an automatic bin return. Instead of members of TSA informing passengers of what is required of them, there are screens along the way with instructions on what it is passengers need to do to have their luggage and person checked without having to be patted down by TSA.

To ensure that passengers are not bringing anything through security that is not allowed, passengers have to step into a "clear glass body scanning booth." The "millimeter wave technology" is incredibly sensitive, so much so that taking off shoes is not required.

In fact, one reporter who went through the booth recognized that the scan picked up a handkerchief he had forgotten about. Not only does the scanner pick up metal objects like scanners do now, but any material is fair game. This is how patdowns have become a thing of the past in Las Vegas.

In conjunction with a patdown no longer being necessary, passengers can take their time getting through security, which keeps stress levels down before getting onto a plane.

"Really, one of the main aims here is to allow individuals to get through the system without necessarily having to interact directly with an officer and ... at their own pace," explained TSA Administrator Christina Peach. "It’s also about not feeling rushed."

While this technology sounds like it should be implemented at more airports throughout the US, it is only going to be at the Harry Reid International Airport, leaving passengers wondering why.

Pros & Cons Of TSA Precheck Vs. Global Entry Vs. Clear

Why the tsa innovation checkpoint is only available in las vegas, the innovation checkpoint is a prototype and data is being collected to see if it can be rolled out at airports in the future.

The TSA Innovation Checkpoint in Las Vegas is not being implemented at any other airports. It is not because the infrastructure would be hard to install at major airports. Instead, Harry Reid International is the only airport currently getting this technology because it is a prototype . As a result, data is being collected to see how efficient the technology truly is.

"We are constantly looking at innovative ways to enhance the passenger experience, while also improving security," TSA Administrator David Pekoske explained. "Testing at the Innovation Checkpoint in Las Vegas gives us an opportunity to collect valuable user data and insights, and explore opportunities to apply parts of the prototype to other airport security checkpoints."

The Innovation Checkpoint data will inform TSA about how the "system’s performance, design, cybersecurity, human factors, and other variables" will impact the future development of TSA self-screening. Once this is determined, there is the possibility of the technology coming to other major airports. But when that will occur has not been disclosed.

The 16 Worst Problems You Can Run Into In An Airport (& How To Solve Them)

Tsa officers will not be losing their jobs because of the new tsa self-screening process, tsa officers will instead be used in a capacity that places "attention on broader security concerns".

With the new technology, TSA officers may fear that their jobs will be on the line , given that the Innovation Checkpoint is essentially self-service. However, that reportedly is not the case. The TSA officers will instead be able to keep the focus elsewhere during the screening process, keeping passengers even safer than they are today.

"No one is going to lose their jobs," TSA federal security director in Nevada, Karen Burke stated. Instead, the 12 TSA agents that used to man the security lines will be dropped to eight, with the remaining TSA officers being able to "focus more attention on broader security concerns."

But, with the Innovation Checkpoint likely being for the more "experienced passengers," the anticipation is that it will be some time before the self-check becomes commonplace in Las Vegas. But by taking some "time to educate the public" about the process, the hope is that getting through security will become a breeze and help with the congestion that currently exists at airports today.

Screen Rant

Predestination movie ending explained: the fizzle bomber's real identity & how time travel works.

The Predestination movie explained helps clarify lingering questions on the film's ending, how time travel works, and who the Fizzle Bomber is.

• Predestination's mind-bending time travel elements offer a new twist on a classic plot device.
• Ethan Hawke's standout performance and chemistry with Sarah Snook drive the film's engaging noir romance.
• The shocking ending reveals the Fizzle Bomber's true identity and tackles the theme of fate vs. free will.

The Predestination movie explained covers the ending, the Fizzle Bomber's identity, the mind-bending time-travel elements, and so much more. Directed by the German-Australian brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, this 2014 sci-fi action thriller is in a long lineage of time travel movies , and, like the best of them, it offers an original twist on a classic story device . In the film, Ethan Hawke stars as Agent Doe, a New York City detective, but not of the NYPD. Doe's jurisdiction concerns time, not city blocks, and his hunt for a terrorist known as the Fizzle Bomber takes him through the decades.

Despite flopping at the box office, critics and audiences loved Predestination . It's a mysterious noir, combined with an engaging romance, and time travel elements that are interesting from the technical side of the film's structure, as well as from a thematic standpoint. In a film titled Predestination , the idea of what is and isn't ordained by fate is constantly put into question. It's one of Ethan Hawke's best movie performances and his chemistry with Sarah Snook as Jane Doe is undeniable, even after Predestination 's shocking ending tilts their relationship on its axis.

Best Movie Plot Twists Of The Decade

What happens in predestination's ending, how does john meet jane.

Predestination 's plot weaves back and forth over itself, and the beginning is as important as the end. At the start of the film, in 1975, Agent Doe is trying to stop the Fizzle Bomber from blowing up a building. He fails, and his face is burned off in the explosion. Doe escapes to 1992, to the Temporal Bureau's headquarters, with the aid of a mysterious man who hands him Doe's time travel device. At headquarters, Doe's face is reconstructed, and his voice altered, so he appears as someone completely new (and someone who happens to look like Ethan Hawke).

Agent Doe then travels to 1970 where he meets a barfly, John, who tells him this story. John was born female and named Jane. After giving birth via Caesarean section in 1964, doctors discovered that Jane was intersex. The doctors did not wait to get Jane's permission before performing a necessary hysterectomy due to birthing complications, and also forcing her through gender reassignment surgery. While these surgeries were happening, someone abducted Jane's child. Jane adopts the name John and goes to a bar , which is where Agent Doe meets him in 1970 and where John tells this story.

The Agent asks John to take his job with his secret agency, the Temporal Bureau, with the promise that John can get revenge on the mysterious man who fathered John's baby. That mysterious man disappeared in 1963, leaving John to fend for himself, and John blames the man for his life, which has since fallen apart. The Agent and John travel to 1963, and John sees Jane and recognizes this as the moment Jane fell in love with the mysterious man. Meaning John fell in love with himself and made a child, with himself .

After John impregnates Jane, the Agent tells John he must leave to complete the mission. John leaves, breaking Jane's (his own) heart. Secretly, the Agent also travels a year forward to 1964, abducts Jane and John's child, and brings her to the Cleveland orphanage in 1945. That means John, Jane, and the child are all the same person . The Agent has helped create a time travel paradox problem .

Agent Doe Is The Fizzle Bomber

An epic twist in a movie filled with them.

The Fizzle Bomber is a terrorist shown at the beginning of Predestination whom Agent Doe fails to capture. However, the bomb that disfigures the Agent's face is not the problem. The problem is that years after 1975, in 1992, the Fizzle Bomber will strike again after lying dormant for over a decade and kill 11,000 people. The Temporal Agency wants to nip this in the bud as early as possible. It is not until the end of Predestination that the identity of the Fizzle Bomber is revealed. They are Agent Doe.

Years of time traveling have shattered the Agent's mind and convinced him that by unleashing his bombs, he will save countless more people in alternate futures. As out of sorts as the Fizzle Bomber sounds, he could be right with how much Predestination plays with time. Exploding a bomb in one reality could very well save many more people in another. The Fizzle Bomber claims that if the Agent shoots them, he will seal his fate, and eventually become the Fizzle Bomber, as predestined.

The Agent, vowing that his future will be different, shoots the Fizzle Bomber before he can use his device. As the film fades to black, a tape recording of a message the Agent left for John can be heard, pondering if the future can ever really be changed.

Mr. Robertson Is Responsible For The Agent's Existence

The leader of the temporal bureau is the puppet master.

One of the few characters in Predestination who is not multiple people is Mr. Robertson (Noah Taylor), Agent Doe's superior at the Temporal Bureau. Mr. Robertson first approached Jane to recruit her to SpaceCorp, but she was rejected for being intersex. Later, he approaches Jane again, right after John leaves her, and tells Jane that he lied and that he actually works for the Temporal Bureau. Jane is recruited and rejected again since she's pregnant. Later, Mr. Robertson reveals another twist: the Agent is also Jane/John .

Mr. Robertson has orchestrated the conception, birth, and death of the Agent, creating what he sees as the perfect time-traveling agent. He has no family, no history, no reason to be anything but an agent of the Bureau, unable to be killed even, as the Agent ensures he is born, before he sets off on his quest to stop the Fizzle Bomber. Mr. Robertson even allowed the Agent to become the Fizzle Bomber, claiming that his actions motivated the need and growth of the Temporal Bureau .

Mr. Robertson presents an interesting idea in Predestination . All along it has seemed that the Agent/Jane/John/Fizzle Bomber are unable to change their futures, that their fates are predestined. However, Mr. Robertson has been influencing events himself , leading his Agent from one year to another. If he can so influence the past and future, then it's reasonable to assume that the Agent can if he would ever try.

How The Time Travel In Predestination Works

A head-scratching predestination paradox made clear.

The Predestination time travel rules can begin getting Byzantine if examined too closely, but at its most basic level, the time travel is simple. Any starting point is fine, seeing as the baby, Jane, John, the Agent, and the Fizzle Bomber are all the same person. An infant is placed at a Cleveland orphanage in 1945. That infant grows up to be Jane, a woman who is intersex. In 1963, Jane meets a mysterious man, has a romantic affair with him, and conceives a child. In 1964, Jane gives birth to a daughter who is abducted without her knowing.

Jane undergoes a hysterectomy and gender reassignment surgery in 1964 and begins living under the name John, and relocates to New York City. In 1970, John sits at a bar and is served by the Agent working undercover as a bartender. The Agent brings John back to Cleveland in 1963, where John falls in love with Jane. John is then whisked away to become a Temporal agent. One of his missions is to stop a man known as the Fizzle Bomber in 1975. He fails and John has his face disfigured and replaced. He is now the Agent.

The Agent goes back to 1970 and poses as a barkeep and takes John to 1963. While John and Jane are beginning a romance, the Agent jumps to 1964, steals Jane's baby, then takes the baby to 1945 and places her in a Cleveland Orphanage, starting the cycle of birth. So what happens to the Agent now? Jane's birth is on a loop , but what happens after baby Jane is sent to the beginning of the loop?

The Agent sits and waits for 1975. When John arrives to stop the Fizzle Bomber, the Agent is the mysterious man who helps him and sends him to 1992. Now it's just the Fizzle Bomber and the Agent. How this stand-off comes about is unclear. At some point, the time loop broke, or shifted, or an alternate reality was created, because the Agent undergoes psychosis, something Mr. Robertson warned would happen with too many jumps , and decides that setting up the bombs himself is the only solution.

The Fizzle Bomber warns the Agent that killing him will lead the Agent down a road that will see him as the Fizzle Bomber, but the Agent kills him anyway. It's never shown how the Agent goes on to become the Fizzle Bomber , so it's possible that if there are alternate realities in Predestination , perhaps this time around the Agent managed to avoid his fate.

The Real Meaning Of Predestination's Ending

The agent has to learn to let go of his past.

Predestination is such an excellent time travel movie not because of the mechanics of the actual time travel, but what the film has to say about fate, predestination, and dealing with the trauma of the past. Every iteration of the Agent could choose to change their fate. John could have stayed with Jane, the Agent could have not killed the Fizzle Bomber, and the Agent could have not abducted baby Jane. The Agent's life is a never-ending cycle of trauma , and the Fizzle Bomber tells him that if he doesn't shoot, the cycle could end.

However, the Agent lets his past dictate his future and plays right into a predetermined fate's hands. Instead of confronting the source of his trauma, the Agent starts it all over again, forcing himself to relive it over and over. The tape recorder at the end of the movie, of the Agent wondering aloud to John whether the future can be changed, can be viewed as a grim ironic final note, or it can be a hopeful message for Predestination . This loop, the Agent has failed, but perhaps next time, he'll realize the answer to his own question, is "Yes".

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Predestination

M25 closure: Everything you need to know as drivers face delays on first morning of 'nightmare' diversion

The UK's busiest motorway is shut in both directions this weekend across a five-mile stretch. Here's what you need to know about how bad traffic could be, a map of the diversion route and why it's happening.

News reporter

Sunday 17 March 2024 05:25, UK

Drivers are facing significant delays as a section of the M25 shuts in both directions this weekend in an unprecedented move.

Motorists saw two miles of congestion on the approach to the closure in Surrey this morning, as traffic builds along the main diversion route through Byfleet, West Byfleet, Woking and Ottershaw.

National Highways estimated that the average journey time along the diversion route on Saturday morning was 25 minutes.

The closure of a five-mile stretch between junctions 10 and 11 on the UK's busiest motorway is already causing travel chaos - just hours into a two-and-a-half day closure.

Daryl Jordan, of Woking Borough Council, said residents will be "affected massively" by the closure, adding: "It's going to be a nightmare."

South East Coast Ambulance Service, which covers Surrey, also urged drivers to clear the way for ambulances ahead of a "challenging weekend" for crews.

But how long will the section be shut, where are the diversion routes and why is it happening?

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Here's everything you need to know.

When is the closure and how long will it last?

The closure started at 9pm on Friday 15 March and the section will be shut until 6am on Monday 18 March, covering the five-mile stretch between junction 10 and 11.

What is the diversion route?

Here's the 11.5-mile diversion route that's been outlined by National Highways, which maintains England's motorways:

• Junction 10 to junction 11: Northbound A3 to Painshill Junction, A245 towards Woking, and then A320 to M25 junction 11
• Junction 11 to junction 10: A320 south towards Woking, A245 towards Byfleet and Painshill junction, Southbound A3 to junction 10.

You can see it on the map below:

And here are some Google Maps screenshots showing roads that are part of the diversion route:

Satnav warnings

Drivers are being urged to ignore satnavs and only follow official diversion routes to prevent causing gridlock during an "unprecedented" closure.

Jonathan Wade, National Highways project lead, said the amount of disruption will partly depend on whether drivers stick to official diversions.

"How many people are going to take the initiative and try and use satnavs?" he said.

"There's probably a greater risk of congestion by people just doing their own thing and thinking they can perhaps beat the signs and find a shorter or quicker route.

"That will cause further congestion on some of the key junctions so please avoid doing that if at all possible."

National Highways senior project manager Daniel Kittredge said: "If people move away from diversion routes that we prescribe, it creates additional issues in different parts of the road network.

"The majority of the time that will be local roads, so that really impacts residents in those particular areas.

"That's why we're trying to encourage people to not follow the satnav.

"Stick on the prescribed diversion route. It's going to be more suitable for your journey."

How bad could it be?

It's the first scheduled daytime all-lanes shutdown on the M25 since it opened in 1986, so the full extent of possible delays is not yet known.

This section of the M25 normally carries between 4,000 and 6,000 vehicles in each direction per hour from 10am until 9pm at weekends, so the disruption caused by the works is expected to be significant.

More than 200,000 vehicles are expected to be affected, including many travelling in and out of London, and to and from Heathrow and Gatwick airports and Channel ports.

Business owners along the diversion route have said they were forced to make cuts to their services in anticipation of traffic.

Mark Pollak, owner of Billy Tong, which caters for events and sells biltong at markets, said he expects to see 50% of the firm's turnover for the weekend go "down the drain".

He said he had to refuse a request for Billy Tong to cater an event in Guildford and had to cancel its stall at Surbiton Farmers' Market on Saturday, with staff not wanting to face expected traffic to get to jobs.

What advice has been issued?

"Drivers should only use the M25 if their journey is absolutely necessary," said Mr Wade.

"This is the first of five full closures of one of the busiest junctions on our road network," he added.

"We have spent months planning for these closures and making sure there are diversion routes in place, but there will still be heavy congestion and delays."

'Motorists should decorate the bathroom'

Mr Wade also advised motorists to find something to do at home like " decorate the bathroom " or "play in the garden" ahead of the closure.

He urged people to avoid travelling altogether.

"Avoid the area totally if you can," he told The Independent's daily travel podcast.

"Either avoid travelling completely or find something to do at home, decorate the bathroom or something, I don't know, or play in the garden.

"If you must go, travel by train, walk, use your bicycle.

"If you can, avoid driving anywhere around those diversionary routes."

Airport warnings

People due to travel to Gatwick and Heathrow could also be affected by the closure.

Heathrow Airport is advising passengers planning to use this part of the M25 to allow for extra time before their flight.

"Passengers using public transport should also be aware that The Airline (between Heathrow and Gatwick) and RailAir (RA2), will be running amended timetables over this weekend, please check with your operator for the latest information," their statement said.

A London Gatwick Airport spokesperson told Sky News: "Passengers driving to the airport are advised to check diversion routes before they travel and allow extra time for potential delays.

"Gatwick's train station is well-connected and is a great alternative option for people travelling to the airport this weekend."

'You ain't seen nothing yet'

Steve Gooding, director of motoring research charity the RAC Foundation, said: "For drivers who've already had their patience tried by the queues at the junction 10 works, the phrase 'you ain't seen nothing yet' springs to mind."

"National Highways' plea for people to avoid driving in the area applies not just to trips on the M25, but also to those on surrounding local roads on to which the M25 traffic will be diverted," he added.

"The hope must be that drivers take great care, however frustrating the delays and disruption might be.

"The last thing we need is shunts or crashes, however minor, because the slightest mishap will compound the misery."

Other motoring experts have warned that official estimates of congestion levels may be "optimistic" while local councillors in areas where motorway traffic will be diverted are anticipating "gridlock".

Read more from Sky News: Luxury hotel offers free night's stay if it rains too much 'Absolutely gross' maggots force flight to make U-turn

Why is it happening?

Government-owned company National Highways said the action is necessary to enable a bridge to be demolished and a new gantry to be installed as part of a £317m improvement project.

National Highways says the project will increase the number of lanes and make it easier to enter and exit the M25 at junction 10, which is one of the UK's busiest and most dangerous motorway junctions.

"These improvements will bring long-term benefits to drivers who pass through this stretch of the M25, not to mention pedestrians, cyclists and horse riders who will also see positive changes in the area," Mr Wade said.

Is the closure a one-off?

No - it's just one of five planned full closures between the junctions. The other dates have not yet been confirmed.

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"Three of those closures will be between junctions 10 and 11 - the A320 at Chertsey... and two of them will be between junction 9 at Leatherhead to junction 10 at Wisley," Mr Wade said.

He said the dates of the later stages would be released in due course with motorists given plenty of notice.

"We will not just spring them on people," he said, adding they would take place between May and December.

The project began in summer 2022 and is expected to last three years in total.

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Elon Musk Says Future Version of Starship Will Travel Between Star Systems

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While it may seem like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is spending most of his time making distasteful comments on his social media platform X, the billionaire says he's still dead set on getting humanity to Mars.

In a recent post , Musk claimed that his space company's massive Starship spacecraft is "designed to traverse our entire solar system and beyond to the cloud of objects surrounding us," likely referring to the giant spherical shell called the Oort Cloud that surrounds the solar system.

"A future Starship, much larger and more advanced, will travel to other star systems," he wrote, adding yet another even bigger and more ambitious step to his already grandiose vision .

Needless to say, the company has its work cut out to get there. This week, SpaceX attempted its third orbital launch of Starship, reaching an apogee of 145 miles and crossing the continent of Africa, before crashing uncontrollably into the Indian Ocean.

Despite the anticlimactic end, the launch was deemed a big success, marking a new milestone for the space company in its efforts to develop its super-heavy launch platform.

To Musk, the stainless steel rocket is humanity's ticket to becoming an interplanetary species in the long run.

Naturally, the mercurial CEO took this week's launch as an opportunity to offer up some characteristically — and perhaps overly — ambitious timelines.

"Starship will be on Mars within five years," Musk argued .

To put that timeline into perspective, NASA's Artemis 3 mission , which will involve a Starship taking astronauts from the Moon's orbit down to the surface, was originally slated for 2025, but was pushed back to 2026 .

In other words, before Starship can "traverse our entire solar system and beyond," SpaceX still has a lot to prove — and that's putting it lightly.

For starters, Starship still needs to be able to reliably get into orbit and make it back to the ground in one piece, which is easier said than done considering it dwarfs the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

Then the company has to prove that one Starship can refuel another while in Earth's orbit. SpaceX also has to develop a life support system for longer journeys through the solar system, let alone find a way to actually have enough fuel to get to its intended destination.

If it were up to Musk, future iterations of the rocket would be able to cover the 4.2 light-years to the Sun's closest star, Proxima Centauri, and beyond. At current levels of technology, covering that distance would take around 6,300 Earth years .

In other words, humanity would likely either have to hibernate or reproduce on board to get to see another star system — unless SpaceX finds a way to break the laws of physics and travel at the speed of light with something like a warp drive , which remains an extraordinarily far-fetched possibility.

Musk, of course, is no stranger to making audacious claims about what SpaceX will mean for the future of humanity.

But whether reality will be able to keep up with his controversial vision is still written in the stars.

More on Starship: SpaceX Starship Makes It to Space, But Crash-Lands In the Ocean

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Dine at a table that moves you from room to room? A look at the future of theme parks

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The theme park industry is expansive.

The catch-all term encompasses your favorite rides, yes, but also an assortment of industries, ranging from architecture to animation to cinema to engineering to writing to game design. And that’s just a surface-level scan. Walt Disney Imagineering, the company’s secretive arm devoted to theme park experiences, likes to say that there are more than 100 job classifications among its ranks.

The theme park industry is also stealthy, a world of heavily trained spokespeople and nondisclosure agreements.

But once a year the Themed Entertainment Assn. throws an event in Southern California designed to honor the best of the past year . Honorees can range from the high-profile — the dance-like movements of Walt Disney World coaster Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind — to important but lesser known museum or new media offerings, such as Colored: The Unknown Life of Claudette Colvin, a traveling experience that arms attendees with augmented reality goggles and a small backpack, and sets them free to discover a forgotten story from the civil rights movement.

Accompanying the awards show are two days of panels and talks designed to give honorees the opportunity to discuss their projects. It provides a peek into the global theme park industry, and a high-level look at where the industry is heading.

I spent two days taking in these events in Hollywood, and this is what I learned.

Themed restaurants are becoming more interactive

Themed restaurants have come in and out of favor over the centuries — see the fanciful European-inspired façades and interiors of the World’s Fair restaurants of the 1890s, or the theatrical restaurant culture of Paris in the 18th and 19th centuries. Our city, of course, has had a rich history of themed restaurants , eateries decorated like a prison in the 1920s and a submarine in the late 1980s.

Germany’s Eatrenalin aims to go one step further, merging the techniques of a slow-moving dark ride with fine dining. Eatrenalin first started generating headlines in the themed entertainment space a little more than a year ago, and to combat any notion that it may be a gimmick, founders have long touted that it’s dedicated to exploring a multi-sensory experience. Each of its eight courses is served in a different room, but guests never have to leave their seats, as their chair will bring them from space to space by gliding across the trackless floor (think any number of modern rides, such as Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance at Disneyland, but slower, of course).

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Expansive screens surround the diners — an underwater scene of colorful jellyfish accompanies a seafood pairing. But the backdrops aim to be more than a pretty setting; there’s a story to tell. Eat something sweet, for instance, and perhaps honey will appear on the screens as its scent slowly fills the room.

In an area dedicated to what co-founder Thomas Mack described as the “world of umami,” chairs will twist and glide guests into a space outfitted like a Japanese market. Think of each course as being served in a restaurant of its own, with the experience — starting at around $250 or so — ultimately taking guests to the moon.

Co-founder Oliver Altherr said the initial concept was born out of conversations about our increasingly tech-driven society and what it’s doing to attention spans. Eatrenalin wants to slow us down — smartphones are asked not to be used in most rooms, in part to keep guests focused on the story but also to preserve the experience for those who have not yet done it.

“When we looked at the trends at what’s happening in the world,” said Altherr, “we saw that the concentration space is getting shorter and shorter. People don’t want to sit the whole evening in a fine dining constellation in the same spot. They want more interactive stimulus.”

It appears to be working, so much so that Mack and Altherr were using their time in the United States to take meetings with investors for the second Eatrenalin location. So how about, say, Southern California, the birthplace of American make-believe and the modern theme park? “That’s one of the reasons we’re here now,” Altherr said, referring to their attendance at the Hollywood event. “We’re talking to people. We see L.A. or Las Vegas as a very nice spot for an Eatrenalin.”

Will augmented reality become more real?

Last year, the first major augmented reality attraction landed in the United States in the form of Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge at Universal Studios Hollywood. It’s a ride that places interactivity and playfulness ahead of speed and thrills. I’d argue it’s the best implementation of a game-focused attraction in Southern California, as it mixes silliness — the augmented reality comes courtesy of visors we wear, which also serve as aiming devices — with game-like proficiency amid largely physical sets.

But as much as I consider it a joy to ride and play, I recognize it also is representative of some of the challenges of bringing games — and digital accouterments — into physical spaces. Like Disneyland’s Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, Bowser’s Challenge takes a moment to get acclimated to. It’s a ride that gets better each time a guest rides it. That the focus is on re-riding isn’t a bad thing; I’m still noticing new things on It’s a Small World, despite having ridden it more than 100 times in my lifetime. It’s simply that the experience gets stronger as guests learn the game. I encountered plenty of attendees who had subpar initial experiences on the attraction.

Yet theme park creatives are clearly thinking about games and how to better meld them with physical spaces. Increasingly, a vast segment of theme park attendees come from a generation that was weaned on games and an interactive, on-demand lifestyle. “It’s almost impossible to have any conversation in the world of entertainment without acknowledging that gaming and digital and what [people] are doing at home is increasingly competing with what’s happening in a park or a physical setting,” said Kirin Sinha, who runs augmented reality firm Illumix, on a state of the industry panel.

“When you’re in these game worlds, you have a sense of agency,” Sinha continued. “You’re impacting the story. The world is fluid.”

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Bringing such agency into a theme park has been a hot topic for a number of years. Last year, for instance, the Themed Entertainment Assn. honored Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser with an award. Colloquially known as the “Star Wars hotel,” Florida’s Starcruiser was essentially a live-in theme park, a two-day live action role-playing game that utilized a mobile phone app to drive gameplay with real-life actors and sets. A critical success — though exorbitantly priced, I wondered if it was the future of how we would vacation — the Starcruiser shuttered after about a year of operation, failing essentially as a business enterprise.

“Let’s face it, gaming and gamers is the biggest audience we can have,” said Bruce Vaughn, the creative chief of Walt Disney Imagineering who re-joined the firm last year after departing in 2016. But how best to access that audience?

In the time between Imagineering stints, Vaughn helped oversee DreamScape Immersive, a virtual reality-based firm that had focused on communal games. DreamScape, too, was a critical success, but recently closed its Century City location, and announced that the company was pivoting toward educational pursuits, a further sign that succeeding outside the home with commercial XR projects — a term applied to virtual and augmented reality technologies — remains a hurdle.

Vaughn was not asked directly about any Disney projects and spoke only broadly, but stated, “None of us have really nailed it,” when it came bringing social gaming environments into a physical space.

“In my first round at Imagineering, pre-2016, we tried many things that allowed more agency and begins to touch on this,” Vaughn said, noting they failed to connect the home experience and the theme park visit in what he felt was a truly meaningful way. Vaughn theorized that things will get “more interesting as XR gets more real in the very near future. ... I think that is something that we’re really craving.”

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Theme parks have long been at the vanguard of technology, as evidenced by everything from lifelike robotic advancements to the all-enveloping playsets that are Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Pandora — the World of Avatar. Augmented reality, which can add a new dimension to a ride like Mario Kart or, at home, spring a board game to life , was seen as the next frontier, even if attendees were scant on specifics.

Those in the audience could speculate among themselves. Glasses that could turn Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge into a hub of spaceship activity, or flip Main Street, U.S.A. into a physical game board where Tinker Bell spreads pixie dust? Or perhaps digital overlays that dig into theme park history, allowing for guest-driven tours?

But that was just off-the-cuff guesswork. So far, a lot of augmented reality implementation in theme parks has been of the virtual “sticker” variety, that is, placing a digital character alongside a guest in a photo. It’ll get better, attendees promised.

“I’m very excited about augmented reality and what that can do. It’s going to be a bit of a disruption,” Vaughn said.

And yet that ultimately came with a warning, to build, essentially, from the bottom up and look for the tech that accentuates a product rather than the other way around. “Our product ultimately is emotion,” Vaughn said.

Perhaps there’s hope for the mall, after all?

Depending on who you’re talking to, the mall is either dead or on the verge of a revival. The suburban Chicago mall I grew up with is marked for closure and a reimagining, and giant department stores such as Macy’s have been struggling .

But then there’s research that points to Gen Z leading to a potential mall rebirth , arguing that malls provide both instant shopping gratification and an opportunity to be among the community. And the theme park industry has long had a rich history with malls, be it the amusement-centered Mall of America or the ways in which escape rooms and immersive art companies like Meow Wolf have found they provide the sort of big box spaces they need to create.

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China’s Aura: The Forest at the Edge of the Sky attempts to split the difference between a Meow Wolf-like art exhibition and a traditional shopping experience. Developed in conjunction with New Zealand’s special effects house Wētā Workshop, Aura wants to be a mix of bold — there’s a 30-meter tall LED waterfall — and calming, as the centerpiece of the mall’s atrium is a 27-meter “Tree of Light,” which presents choreographed audio and visual shows. It’s an indoor space that serves as a love letter to nature, as designs were influenced by Eastern philosophies and strive to show that man-made structures can still be teeming with artistic life.

What stood out from the Aura team’s presentation was how a sense of movement permeates the space. An escalator is an excuse to create a 40-meter-long woodland-inspired tunnel, and pathways extend and weave out into the mall to circulate among the artificial trees. No one is going to mistake anything in Aura for the real thing, but that’s because it’s going for a fantastical, otherworldly look, with glowing leaves and orb-accentuated branches.

The overall tone is one that’s crystalline and fragile — there’s a “Tree Deer” sculpture that’s six meters high and filled with media panels, as aspects of the environment react to guest movements and actions. But rather than present a straightforward path regarding where to walk and what to touch, Wētā’s team opted to go for a sense of discovery and mystery, hiding interactive elements in nooks throughout the atrium.

“Like in nature, nothing is signposted,” said Richard Taylor, Wētā Workshop co-founder. “Surprise and discovery became an important design rule that we wanted to allow for. So for example, we didn’t want a visitor to go stand on a spot and press something and activate a thing. That doesn’t happen in nature and perhaps it shouldn’t happen in this space as well. So this thinking, that’s what we believe helped heighten the mystique of the place.”

Credit its success — in its first year of operation, Taylor said, more than 4.5 million tourists visited Aura — that form need not follow function.

Your time will cost you money. Expect more theme park add-ons and microtransactions.

Most Themed Entertainment Assn. events are largely focused on the creative aspects of the industry, deftly avoiding touchy business subjects to instead present the business as one big utopia centered on creating communal experiences. But there was one moment in which reality snuck in, and that’s when Al Cross of PGAV Destinations asked a theme park panel to discuss theme park pricing models, focusing specifically on up-pay initiatives such as line-skipping features.

At Universal Studios, for instance, this is known as Universal Express, which here in Hollywood can double the cost of admission to allow for one-time front-of-line access. At Disneyland, this perk is called Genie+, and typically sells for about $30 per person to allow for quicker access to an assortment of attractions. Other in-demand attractions, such as Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, are not part of the Genie+ experience but are available as “individual Lightning Lanes,” often an additional $25 or so to purchase.

Expect such practices to continue.

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“It’s one of the areas where you will see the most development in the years to come,” said Andreas Andersen, CEO of Sweden’s Liseberg Group. “I think the pay-one-price model is dying. I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad thing. It will also impact design.”

How, exactly, it will influence design wasn’t unraveled, but many in the industry are eagerly looking forward to Universal Studios’ Epic Universe, under construction in Orlando and soon to be home to four core mini-parks — immersive lands, essentially — themed to Nintendo, “How to Train Your Dragon,” the “Harry Potter” universe and the company’s legacy with monster films.

Though Universal has not yet detailed a pricing structure, it’s widely anticipated within the industry that the company will offer some sort of pay-as-you-go or a la carte model, in which guests can mix and match which of the lands they will visit on a given day. No doubt there will be a premium ticket that provides access to all four “portals,” as Universal is calling them.

“It kind of also maybe reflects the time we’re in, that we want something much more individualized,” said Andersen.

Imagineering’s Vaughn — quickly joking that such a topic was one his public relations team warned to be “cautious” on — said it’s also an area in which theme parks will rely on artificial intelligence, especially when it comes to helping guests plan a day or a vacation. “The genie is out of the bottle,” Vaughn said.

Currently, Disney’s Genie does attempt to help a guest program their day at a Disney theme park, but it’s in its early days and relatively rudimentary. Rare, for instance, is a day when Genie recommends something I actually want to do or a place I want to eat, but I can foresee some simple modifications to improve the guest experience. Say someone wants to dine at a particular restaurant. Rather than regularly checking the app to see if wait lists are open, the app should be able to alert a guest when the wait list is in fact open and if they would like to be added to it.

“We’re in this rough phase where we’re all charging more money to pay for a more expensive product,” Vaughn said. “But at the end of the day, we know how much people are willing to pay ... if they get what they want.”

What Vaughn foresees is “a world of truly predictable itineraries and customizable itineraries” that can “begin to have a dialogue with the guest to understand” what more they would like to do at the theme park. All panelists essentially agreed that today’s culture values time as much as money.

Liseberg’s Andersen, however, was a voice of reason, reminding attendees and panelists that theme parks were once envisioned as shared experiences for all walks of life.

“I hate these programs,” Andersen said. “I understand that they work and they are financially very profitable, but I think we are losing one characteristic of the park. That is that it is a very democratic thing. It’s a place you can go and are like everyone else. I think we are losing something when we take this route, but I also understand we kind of have to. But I don’t like it.”

Theme parks can be magical spaces, places that reflect a culture’s myths and stories back to us, and allow us to connect with friends, loved ones or even strangers. But they can also be high stress, where one, after shelling out hundreds to get in the gate, will learn that a level playing field is impossible as they’re prodded to pay more for additional features.

Rides can get bigger — and explore powerful themes

To end on a more uplifting note, let’s go back to China, specifically to the indoor aquatic park Chimelong Spaceship in Zhuhai.

Here lies Bermuda Storm, a giant 300-seat simulator platform designed to mimic a large seafaring vessel and sit in a sort of all-encompassing multiplex. Credit international destinations with keeping theme parks weird, and the Bermuda Storm doesn’t disappoint. Here in the states, new attractions — last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind at Walt Disney World’s Epcot or the upcoming “Fast and the Furious” coaster at Universal Studios Hollywood — are most always wedded to known intellectual property. But not everyone has access to a film franchise, and the themed entertainment world is richer for it.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind puts an exclamation point on Walt Disney World’s reinvention of Epcot

A review of the new Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind ride at Walt Disney World’s Epcot.

May 5, 2022

What Bermuda Storm does have are animatronic figures, in this case a ship-guiding ape — he’s the “First Primate” — and a topsy-turvy motion platform designed to mimic a trip-gone-wrong to the Bermuda Triangle. The attraction’s original name was the delightfully to-the-point Disaster Theater, but the current Bermuda Triangle designation gives less away. The ride, after all, starts with reggae music and chill vibes. Feel wind, feel maybe some splashes of water, but all is calm, until, well, the storm. And then there are pirates. And then there’s a kraken.

But this kraken is no mythical sea monster. “We conjured a massive and grotesque sea creature grown from all the pollution and the debris that humans have been pouring into oceans and rivers for centuries,” said Rick Rothschild, who heads Far Out! Creative. “Seems like a perfect villain for our story’s finale, while also speaking to the Spaceship’s message of safeguarding the water and protecting the ocean.”

Tapping into conservation elements isn’t exactly a theme park rarity — Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida makes it a priority — but it’s welcome to see such a message in a fantastical, borderline thrill ride for 300 people. And it’s tantalizing to see the topic of sea pollution treated so otherworldly.

Most important, it’s an argument that theme parks remain as unique — and fantastical — as the cities and countries that house them.

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Todd Martens joined the Los Angeles Times in 2007 and covers a mix of interactive entertainment (video games) and pop music. Previously, Martens reported on the music business for Billboard Magazine. He has contributed to numerous books, including “The Big Lebowski: An Illustrated, Annotated History of the Greatest Cult Film of All Time.” He continues to torture himself by rooting for the Chicago Cubs and, while he likes dogs, he is more of a cat person.

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