The idea of using time dilation has a couple of drawbacks but agrees with the laws of physics. Imagine two observers standing on the Earth. Their names are Jennifer and Jane. In space their friend Bob is moving away from the Earth at half the speed of light. Jennifer and Jane use Einstein’s equations to calculate the time loss aboard the ship due to time dilation and compare it to their clock on Earth. They conclude that time aboard the spacecraft has slowed down due to time dilation.

Bob continues to travel away from Earth for five years. After the five years he gets homesick and decides to return to Earth which takes him another five years to get home.

When he reaches Earth, ten years have passed from his point of reference. Bob lands on Earth and finds that his two friends, Jennifer and Jane have aged by seventy years. This is because time ran very slow onboard the spacecraft relative to the Earth. The time dilation added up and made the Earth’s time appear to run faster than the spacecraft’s time. For every second that went by on Bob’s ship, seven seconds passed on Earth. So when Bob reached Earth and stopped the ship, time started to run at the correct speed again. Bob skipped over sixty years to arrive in the future.

Unfortunately Bob has no way of returning to his own time frame and there is no spacecraft or device as of yet capable of travelling at the speeds required which makes this impossible in reality. Due to the complexity and unfeasibility of time travel by time dilation, we continue our search and travel further into space.

If you have a theory, comment or idea for time travel, feel free to submit it and you can have it posted on this page.