The Theory of Time Travel Has Existed For A Very Long Time

In Hindu mythology, there is a story about King Raivata Kakudmi who travels to meet the creator, Brahma in the ancient Indian text of the Mahabharata. This story was written sometime during the 8th century BC. "When Kakudmi returned to earth, 108 yugas had passed. Each yuga represents about 4 million years. The explanation Brahma gave Kakudmi is that time passes differently on the different planes of existence." 

 

There have also been Time Travel references in the Quran in which a group of individuals, the year 250 AD, sought to the persecution and left under God's guidance. They fled to a cave where God made them sleep and then woke up 309 years later. This story relates to the Christian story of the seven sleepers, with a few differences. 

According to Erick von Daniken: 

“In the Bible, the prophet Jeremiah was sitting together with a few of his friends, and there was a young boy. His name was Abimelech, and Jeremiah said to Abimelech, “Go out of Jerusalem, there is a hill and collect some figs for us.” The boy went out and collected the fresh figs. All of a sudden, Abimelech hears some noise and wind in the air, and he becomes unconscious, he had a blackout. After a time, he wakes up again, and he saw it was nearly the evening. So, when he runs back to the society and the city was full of strange soldiers. And he says, “What’s going on here? Where are Jeremiah and all the others?” And an old man said, “That was 62 years ago.” It’s a time travel story written in the Bible. 

In the Japanese legend of Urashima Taro, a man visits the underwater palace of the Dragon God Ryujin, in which he stayed there for three days. When he returned to the surface, he realized 300 years had gone by. 

In the Buddhist text Pali Canon it is written that in the heaven of the thirty Devas (the place of the Gods), time passes to a different rhythm, where a hundred years of the earth count there as a single day 

ByIvan. “Time Travel: from Ancient Texts to Modern Science.” Ancient Code, 25 Sept. 2017, www.ancient-code.com/time-travel-ancient-texts-modern-science/. 

Possible Ways Time Travel Can Be Achieved

1.) Travel at speeds reaching the speed of light, then time relative to the outside world will slow down. (Einstein’s theory of special relativity) 

Traveling 90% the speed of light in a spaceship, time will pass about 2.6 times slower than it was back on Earth. 

It has been measured! Physicists took twin atomic clocks, one flown in a jet aircraft and the other stationary on Earth. The flying clock ticked slower, because of its speed. 

More proof: "The highest speeds achieved through any human technology are probably the protons whizzing around the Large Hadron Collider at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. Using special relativity, we can calculate one second for the proton is equivalent to 27,777,778 seconds, or about 11 months, for us."  

Large Hadron Collider- the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator contained in a circular tunnel, with a circumference of 17 mi, at a depth ranging from 164 to 574 ft. Underground. 

"Physicists hope that the Large Hadron Collider will help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity." 

 

2.) Once again, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, the stronger the gravity you feel, the slower the time moves around you. The strength of gravity increases as you get closer to the center of the Earth. "Time runs slower for your feet than your head." 

It has been measured! "In 2010, physicists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) placed two atomic clocks on shelves, one 33 centimeters above the other, and measured the difference in their rate of ticking. The lower one ticked slower because it feels a slightly stronger gravity." 

To travel to the future, we need a region of extremely strong gravity like a black hole. 

Black Hole- "a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out" 

 

3.) Slow down or stop your bodily processes to slow your perception of time and then restart them later. This is pretty much what happened to Captain America. To help the war cause, he flew his plane into the freezing ocean with a deadly weapon. Decades later, he was discovered to be alive, but frozen. When he came to, he woke up to a different century. Yeah, I get this is just a movie, but it could happen. For example, hibernation. Some animals can slow their bodily processes for a certain amount of time and wake up much later. Maybe humans can do this too, but to more of an extent like years or decades. 

Right now, completely stopping the metabolism is too advanced for our technology but scientists "are working towards achieving inducing a short-term hibernation state lasting at least a few hours" which could help greatly in the medical field. For example, this could be enough time for a medical emergency, like a cardiac arrest, to make it to the hospital in time by slowing the bodily processes, ultimately slowing the rate of death. 

Proof: "In 2005, American scientists demonstrated a way to slow the metabolism of mice (which do not hibernate) by exposing them to minute doses of hydrogen sulphide, which binds to the same cell receptors as oxygen. The core body temperature of the mice dropped to 13 °C and metabolism decreased 10-fold. After six hours the mice could be reanimated without ill effects." 

 

4.) Wormholes "General relativity also allows for the possibility for shortcuts through spacetime, known as wormholes, which might be able to bridge distances of a billion light years or more, or different points in time.  Many physicists, including Stephen Hawking, believe wormholes are constantly popping in and out of existence at the quantum scale, far smaller than atoms. The trick would be to capture one and inflate it to human scales - a feat that would require a huge amount of energy, but which might just be possible, in theory." 

 

5.) Light "Another idea, put forward by the American physicist Ron Mallet, is to use a rotating cylinder of light to twist spacetime. Anything dropped inside the swirling cylinder could theoretically be dragged around in space and in time, in a similar way to how a bubble runs around on top your coffee after you swirl it with a spoon. According to Mallet, the right geometry could lead to time travel into either the past and the future." 

O'Connell, Cathal. “Five Ways to Travel through Time.” Cosmos, 5 Apr. 2016, cosmosmagazine.com/physics/five-ways-travel-through-time.