How our biology forbids time travel!
First of all, let’s define time travel as a physicist would. Time travel isn’t a gimmick of time and space, where you can magically move from one timeline to another. Time travel is a product of how massive an object is and how fast it travels.
There are two ways one can time travel. Either create so much mass that the universe itself bends and allows it to happen. The second is to travel close to the speed of light. This makes space go funky and allows time travel.
I will be focusing on the speed part in this piece. First of all, what exactly is the relation between your speed and the rate of time change?
A simple formula for calculating time dilation by speed:
Put simply, the time elapsed between two points in space is related to the speed at which the object is moving at. The closer we get to the speed of light, the faster the rate becomes.
There is a catch, however. The rate is quite negligible for any practical purposes if the object isn’t travelling in the vicinity of half of the speed of light. For example, travelling at 10% of the speed of light just boosts the process by just 0.5%. Not the most exciting factor. Certainly not taking you to the far future!
There is another problem, however. To go above 150,000 km/s, or about half of the speed of light, we have to discard our human bodies. Simply put, our human bodies can take up speeds of thousands of kilometres per hour, but it has to be constant speed.
We travel around the sun at about 30 km/s and barely feel anything. This is because we aren’t accelerating much and, it is the massive quantity of acceleration that can kill us. Going above 50 or 60 m/s² acceleration over a few seconds is enough to give seizures. Going over 100 is just inviting death to the doorsteps.
To reach even 100,000 km/s, we would have to start from rest and gradually reach the number. Now there are two ways of achieving it.
- To go super speed, you either have to have a bit of acceleration for a long time which is fine, but then it just defeats the purpose of time travel if time is wasted!
- The second solution can be to have a lot of acceleration in a short burst which saves time. But this is a surefire way of killing our poor astronaut.
So, on the one hand, we have to save time and not make the process overcomplicated. On the other hand, we have to make sure that the astronaut reaches in one piece.
Taking a radical approach and changing biology sounds more fun! One solution could be to make the astronaut suits a lot safer, but that doesn’t defeat the fundamental problem of crushing acceleration.
The other could be to send ‘human replacement robots’ that do our work for us. There is a lot of research going on how we can change the face of humans and mind upload to make ourselves eternal. Uploading ourselves on the cloud could make us essentially immortal, and with the rapid change in the neural field, this isn’t as far as we once thought.
This then opens another can of worms. Whether or not the ones completing the journey would even be humans. This I leave to you for deciding.
There is just one more thing left to answer now:
Why time travel?
Contrary to popular belief, time travel isn’t just a means of going to the far future. We can basically cheat the universe in fast-tracking progress with time travel. It is like how we sleep to skip 8 hours of a day and go to the next day when we know there is nothing more to do.
It can act as a means of going on standby and coming back to read the results of any experiment. Current scientific procedures take up to decades to end. There is no way this is going down in the next few years, and we should have contingency plans to preserve the people working on them.
We would even have recreational time travel. The technological marvels with advancement and what it makes of humanity would truly be astounding. Of course, there will always be one Florida man who goes the extra mile and travels like a thousand years in future with no help!
Only time (pun intended) will tell!
