New Orbit Magazine Online: Issue 03, June 2018

Time travel; one of the oldest, most
extensively explored, and well-loved tropes in
science fiction. Though the term “Time
Machine” was coined in 1895 by H.G. Wells,
the concept of moving back and forth
through time as we do through space has
fascinated writers, artists, scientists, and the
rest as far back in time as the origin myths of
Hindu, Buddhist, and even Monotheistic
peoples.
And like so many concepts raised through
the lens of popular fiction, the fantasy that is
time travel has now come alive from the pages
and joined the realms of science, not fiction.
Not only has humankind created a theoretical
basis for the manipulation of our trajectory
through time, but we have achieved this feat,
and are making numerous new discoveries
day by day, of ways to bend the supposed laws
of nature, physics and thermodynamics to our
anthropocentric will.
Is this a feat to be lauded, or feared? The
threat of consequences from interruption of
causality, branching of timelines and fastforwarding
through existence are rife in our
fictional time travel stories. Can we know
what to look out for in this new science fact?
Time travel to the future is currently best
understood as the experience of Time
Dilation. This is one outcome of Einstein's
theories of relativity, which states that the
passage of time is relative, and different, for