How To Travel To The Future

How To Travel To The Future

Einstein theory of Special Relativity basically tells us that time travels slower when you are moving. This is called time dilation and there is data to support this so this isn't some trick or joke.

So that means if you went on a plane moving round and round the Earth, time would move slower for you. Do that for long enough and a lot of time would have passed for everyone else, less time would have passed for you and so you would have effectively traveled to the future (,e.g, you might be 1 year older but everyone else would be 100 years older).

Well its not as simple as this. If you managed to get on a plane that traveled at the speed of sound. Calculating how much time would slow down using a pocket calculator shows time would slow down by 0% ie the amount time would slow down by is so small a pocket calculator can't even work it out.

So lets travel faster. Lets travel at 10% the speedof light (30 million meters per second or 67 million miles per hour) and see what happens.

Well if you traveled for about 100 years. You would probably be dead unfortunately because unfortunately 99.5 years would have passed for you. So lets go faster and see if we can do better.

Lets travel at 50% the speed of light (150 million meters per second or 340 million miles per hour) and see what happens.

Again traveling round the world on a rocket for 100 years then landing would leave you about 13 years  younger than everyone else. This is better but spending 87 years to travel forward 13 seems like a bad deal?

Lets go right up to 99% the speed of light and see if we can see a lot of time dilation. Here we start to see significant effects. You would be 86 years younger than everyone else. ie time passes at 14% of the rate that it passes at for everyone else. You could get on the rocket today, stay on it for 14 years according to you and your clocks and when you stepped off; you would only be 14 years older  yet it would be the year 2118!

So now we can see we can pretty much travel forward 100 years at the cost of 14 years if we can get to 99% the speed of light.

The chart and graph below show the relationship between the speed of light and how much time slows by.

So why can't we do this? Well lets consider how much energy we would need to move a rocket this fast. 

If we assume we are on a rocket weighing nothing and the average human weighs 63kg how much energy would we need? 

34 exajoules (a third of the energy the entire US consumes in a year).

As the mass of an object increases, the energy required to move it also increases.

Empty rockets weigh over 100,000 pounds and fueled rockets weight well over 1,000,000 pounds so a huge amount of energy would be needed to get rockets this heavy at 99% the speed of light.

Lets say we miraculously can build an 1000kg rocket. How much energy would we then need? 

0.5 Zeta joules of enerygy

This is about how much the entire world consumes in a year.

So pretty much time travel this way won't be possible this way or at least for a very long time until we figure out how to travel at 99% the speed of light, build very very very light rockets and get enough energy to move those rockets at 99% the speed of light.

But not all hope is lost.
1. Technology is advancing at an incredible rate and its very hard to predict what will and won't be possible in the future
2. There are other ways in which time travel should theoretically be possible which may be easier (we will consider these in future posts).