Scientists Say Time Travel Is Real — And Some People Have Already Done It

It's possible that Einstein's theory explains why some people have previously traveled through time.

It might be time to reevaluate your dream of becoming the first human to travel across time, as experts now think that has already been accomplished.

The majority of us grew up picturing what it would be like to travel through time like Marty McFly after watching Back to the Future. Researchers argue that time travel is extremely real and has been done before, even though the real-world version might not have a modified DeLorean traveling through eras.

People have been dreaming about it for decades. Many people may be surprised to hear that science claims that time travel has already been accomplished in a useful, albeit less spectacular, manner.

You may be thinking that everyone would be talking about it constantly if this were true.  Surely, there would be headlines everywhere?

 However, it turns out that time travel isn't as spectacular as entering a machine and traveling to the past or the future.  It has more to do with the laws of physics governing time and space travel.

 All of this is related to the special relativity theory that Albert Einstein first proposed in 1905.

 According to Einstein's theory, time moves relative to the observer and does not clock at the same rate for everyone.  We are all moving through time at about the same speed here on Earth.

 On the other hand, people who travel at very high speeds really pass through time faster than those who stay motionless.

Space travel can help with that.  In a very real sense, astronauts are time travelers since they are orbiting the Earth at 17,500 mph, which is faster than our speed.

 The reason why astronauts who spend a lot of time in orbit age more slowly than the rest of us on Earth may be explained by this phenomena.

 For example, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams' bodies had technically spent a little less time than ours when they returned to Earth after more than nine months aboard the International Space Station.  Simply because they were traveling more quickly than we were on the ground, they had a slightly shorter perception of time.

 According to this reasoning, astronauts such as themselves are considered real-life time travelers.

In a straightforward statement, the BBC once stated that space travelers "are spending more of their budget on speed than us and so have less to spend on time."

 The example of astronaut twins Mark and Scott Kelly serves as a stark reminder of this peculiar phenomenon, which is called time dilation.

 Although both of their brothers have visited space, Scott spent around ten times as much time at the ISS as Mark did.

 Mark is officially six minutes and five milliseconds older than Scott, despite the fact that he was born six minutes earlier.  This is because Scott's aging rate was slightly reduced when he was in orbit around the Earth.

In fact, NASA's renowned Twins Study examined and documented this strange discrepancy.

To put it simply, you age more slowly than someone who is not moving as quickly as you are as you approach the speed of light. It's scientific, but it's crazy.

Yes, that does sound a little difficult to understand. That's science for you, though—interesting, challenging, and never precisely what you anticipate.