babbling blue

Most scientists (in relevant fields, of course) now seem to think that traveling back in time is either impossible or impractical–meaning the technology required would be far, far beyond what we’re capable of now. It’s extremely unlikely that someone is going to invent a time machine in their basement.

There are a handful of scenarios that theorists have suggested for how one might travel to the past, said Brian Greene, author of the bestseller, “The Elegant Universe” and a physicist at Columbia University.“And almost all of them, if you look at them closely, brush up right at the edge of physics as we understand it. Most of us think that almost all of them can be ruled out.”

I can’t say I’m surprised by this. I have always believed people couldn’t travel back in time, personally. Too much potential for cataclysmic paradoxes!

The good news is we might someday be able to travel forward in time, so to speak. Of course, we’d be stuck there…

“If you want to know what the Earth is like one million years from now, I’ll tell you how to do that,” said Greene, a consultant for “Déjà Vu,” a recent movie that dealt with time travel. “Build a spaceship. Go near the speed of light for a length of time — that I could calculate. Come back to Earth, and when you step out of your ship you will have aged perhaps one year while the Earth would have aged one million years. You would have traveled to Earth’s future.”