Time travel will become reality in future, physicists say

By Dick Pelletier

     The idea of traveling through time has always fascinated us. We love to dream about going back in the past to change a traumatic event that still bothers us, or glimpse at the future to see how our life will unfold; will we find success and happiness; what wild technologies can we expect.

     The ‘grandfather paradox’ is the argument many people use to suggest that time travel is impossible. What if you went back in time and prevented your grandparents from meeting so that your mother was never born? Then you would never have been born… and so on.

     In the movie Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox struggles to avoid a paradox when he goes back in time and meets his mother as a teenager, who promptly falls for him. However, if she spurns the advances of Michael’s future father, then his very existence is threatened.

     Until very recently such arguments led most scientists to believe that time travel could never exist outside science fiction. However, new interpretations in the weirdness of our quantum world now suggest that time travel is not only possible, but will one day provide major benefits for our future.

     Physicists offer two possible solutions to time travel paradoxes. The first goes like this: nobody can change the past; once an event happens, it appears in our timeline and will never change. Our future is preordained.

     The second focuses on quantum technologies which states that not only are there multiple futures, but they happen in different universes. If we travel back in time and prevent our grandparents from meeting, this immediately transfers us into a universe exactly like the old one, except in this one, we never existed; we appear as a stranger from another universe. However we can never return home – bummer.

     Although black holes and cosmic strings offer hope of traveling through time, most physicists believe that wormholes represent our best shot. Wormholes are theoretical shortcuts through space and time that connect two distant points, like a worm tunnel in an apple.

     Cal Tech’s Kip Thorne showed that we could control wormholes if we used an exotic form of matter, which experts believe might come from ‘phantom energy’, a mysterious dark matter that comprises up to seventy percent of the universe. Lisbon University’s Francisco Lobo believes "An advanced civilization could mine the phantom energy necessary to construct and sustain a traversable wormhole”, making time travel possible.

     How would civilization benefit from this wild technology? We could retrieve scanned minds from lost loved ones the night before they died; upload them into new bodies allowing their lives to continue. We could also search the future for dangers that might befall humanity, and then develop defenses.

     When might time travel become reality? Forward-thinkers believe that advanced nanotech, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence will enable technologies necessary to harness wormholes within 200 to 500 years; so if life extension enthusiasts are correct, many people alive today will experience time travel in their lifetime.

     And if someone should knock on your door one day and claim to be your great-great-great-great granddaughter from the future don’t slam the door – she could be a time traveler.

This article appeared in various print publications and on-line blogs. Comments always welcome.