Question: Do you think we’ll ever create a time machine ?

Aaron Boardley answered on 9 Nov 2015:

The type of time machines you see in movies, where you can step in a box and reappear anywhere in history, are real science fiction. I’m not expecting to ever see one – at least not in my lifetime.

However, moving though time is actually possible. If you travel really, really fast, or go somewhere where the gravity is different, you actually experience time passing by at a different rate. It means the astronauts on the International Space Station are ageing ever so slightly less than those of us here on earth (although only by a few fractions of a second).

If someone in the future went on a really long space trip travelling really fast, then this could theoretically become noticeable. We could send someone away on a spaceship and they might return, from our point of view, 50 years later. However, from their point of view, it may have only felt like 49 years has passed. So, from their perspective, they have travelled 1 year forward into the future.

Speeding up or slowing down time like this isn’t quite an instant time machine, but it’s a start, and it already happens – just on a very, very, very tiny scale.