TIME TRAVEL

what if the dimension of time was no different from the three dimensions of space we live in what if you could travel to the past and to the future the same way you can move right or left up or down would you be able to change the past and if you did would it create a time paradox what kind of time machine would you need to build anyway this is what if and here's what would happen if you could travel two times how many times have you wished you could jump in a time machine and skip that boring meeting or choose a bitter comeback in that argument last week time travel sounds like some wild fantasy that only happens in sci-fi movies but we're actually traveling in time every day Albert Einstein found that time is not a constant but it's continually moving forward and we're moving forward with it according to Einstein time is the fourth dimension together with three-dimensional space it's fused into a single four-dimensional continuum space-time if you think of traveling in space moving upwards is a bit of a challenge unless we get on a plane or at least take the stairs so maybe we just haven't come up with a proper machine to travel in time yet theoretically building a time machine is possible but it wouldn't look like this or like this rather more like this because the secret to time travel isn't in some exotic form of matter what you'd need is a spaceship that could travel almost as fast as light Einstein's theory of relativity taught us that the faster we move through space the slower we move in time let's assume you were in a spaceship traveling at 99.9 percent the speed of light to a potentially habitable exoplanet some 40 light years away you find some primitive life-forms and speed back to earth to share your discovery but when you finally make it back to earth you discover that all your colleagues are now very very old from your perspective you'd only been gone for about two years for people on earth you'd been gone for 80 this phenomenon is known as time dilation it's not likely to happen to you though because traveling at the speed of light isn't quite possible with the technology we have now the fastest piloted vehicle we've ever created Apollo 10 reached a speed of 11,000 meters per second the speed needed for time travel is somewhere near 299 million meters per second on top of that accelerating at that speed would cause an enormous centrifugal force a force that would rip you apart before you came anywhere close to light speed but hey we still have wormholes Einstein predicted that these theoretical tunnels linked two separate places and two different times a shortcut to another universe and another time the problem with wormholes is they're extremely tiny just a billion trillion trillionth of a centimeter across no human would be able to fit through I can barely fit in my jeans from last year if only we could capture a wormhole we might be able to enlarge it imagine a giant tunnel above the earth leading to another planet and theoretically if we put both ends of a wormhole in the same place but in different times we could step into a wormhole and come out in the distant past but wormholes have their issues they're very short-lived and traveling into the past would create paradoxes like the one in which you go back in time and convinced your grandmother never to get married then your grandmother doesn't give birth to your dad he doesn't have you but if you didn't exist who went back in time to talk your grandmother out of marrying your grandfather time is linear it only goes forward for that reason we can only travel into the future not to the past in fact astronauts that spent about a year on the International Space Station are now living in the future compared to us even though it's just 13 milliseconds in the future they're proof that traveling a time is possible and maybe wormholes could open up a whole different world where the laws of physics work in different ways and traveling to the past is possible would you dare step into a time machine not knowing where it would take you and if you had the choice where would you go