Time travel might sound like something straight out of Back to the Future, but scientists say it’s not only possible—it’s already happening.
Thanks to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, we now know that time is not fixed. Instead, it’s flexible and relative, meaning it can pass at different speeds depending on how fast you’re moving and where you are in the universe.
Real time travel isn’t about stepping into a sci-fi machine and jumping to the past or future. It’s about moving through time faster or slower based on speed and gravity. This is known as time dilation, and it’s been proven in real-world experiments.
In 1971, scientists flew atomic clocks around the globe and compared them to a stationary clock. The results? The moving clocks experienced time differently, just as Einstein predicted. One gained time, and the other lost time—all by tiny but measurable amounts.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are modern-day time travelers. Orbiting Earth at 17,500 mph, they age slightly slower than the rest of us. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, for instance, is now a few milliseconds younger than his identical twin Mark, who remained on Earth.
Even our GPS satellites must account for time dilation. Without adjusting for it, they’d give us the wrong locations.
So, can we travel backward in time? That’s where things get complicated. While forward time travel is supported by physics, backward time travel would require bending space-time into a loop—a theoretical structure called a wormhole. But keeping one open would require exotic, “negative mass” that we haven’t proven exists.
Time travel is real—but it’s not what Hollywood promised. You’re doing it every day… just in milliseconds, not centuries.
