Is time travel possible?
Much-loved comic strip figures Suske and Wiske have had many wild adventures in Professor Barabas’ Teletime Machine. Time travel shows up in lots of comics, books and films too.But the big question is: could we ever do it for real?
Travel at very high speeds
Absolutely! Believe it or not, time travel to the future is already possible. Albert Einstein discovered that when you travel at very high speeds, time slows down for you compared to others who are not moving or travelling more slowly.
So, you’d age more slowly than someone standing still.
Imagine you travel super fast for one year. When you come back, 10 years might have passed for everyone else! It’s like you’ve skipped ahead 9 years into the future!
Astronauts
But to do that, you’d need to travel at incredible speeds – hundreds of millions of kilometres per hour! That’s way beyond what we can do right now.
The fastest-moving people at the moment are astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). They orbit Earth at around 28,000 kilometres per hour. The astronaut who stayed the longest on the ISS only moved about two hundredths of a second into the future. That’s time travel – just not the kind you read about or see in movies!
For real time travel, far into the future, we’d need spaceships that go much, much faster. They might take hundreds of years to build – but who knows? Maybe someone will invent something amazing and make it happen much sooner!
Back in time
Could we ever go back in time? According to Einstein, not with the physics we know today. It would take some strange things we’re not even sure exist. Like wormholes – shortcuts through space. Or a cosmic string – a nearly invisible thread stretching across the universe.
Luckily, we canlook into the past – just by peering at the stars. Their light has taken so long to reach us that you’re seeing them as they were ages ago.
With powerful telescopes, we’re not just stargazing – we’re time-travelling! We’re seeing light that’s billions of years old, almost back to when the universe was born.
Answered by Yannick Fritschy
