Time Travel via. Massive Orbit


The previous page focused on theoretical ideas that aimed to achieve velocities near the speed of light in order to produce significant time dilation and thus significant time travel. The same case can be made for ideas that use the fact that gravitational fields also cause time dilation.

The best method to travel in time using gravity involves a ship similar to the previous one. This ship however would not need to achieve a velocity near the speed of light. This ship would travel towards a massive object, such as a star, and would orbit the star for a period time and then return to Earth. The time spent orbiting the star would be dilated relative to Earth, and thus the passengers of this ship would have traveled forwards in time. Careful calculations would have to be preformed in order to assure that the ship only orbits the star, or else the ship would be destroyed in a fiery mess. The ship would be equipped with shields in order to protect it and the people within from the heat and radiation of the star. If instead, the ship were to travel near a black hole the same effect could be achieved. The ship could simply sit idle right outside of the event horizon of the black hole and after enough time had passed could return back to Earth.

Clearly, this kind of shielding technology does not yet exist, and a source of power capable of getting a spaceship to a nearby star has also not been developed yet. But, theoretically, this would also be a time machine. Time travel using gravitational time dilation is equally as possible as relative velocity time travel.



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