Meet Artemis.
Somewhere beneath that helmet lurks a fabulous handlebar moustache.
He’s the resident astronaut here at cheaptvs.co.uk (sure, we have one of those) and 30 years ago, he was in the cinema when a little film called Back to the Future hit the screens at 88mph – we think you might have heard of it? Scissor doored-car? Teen Wolf was in it. Anyway…
The Back to the Future trilogy brought a bunch of questions with it: Can movies really be this mind-bendingly awesome? Will we really have hover boards in 2015? And how can I do all this time travel stuff right here in the real world? After answering the first two questions (yes and, sadly, no) Artemis made a promise to the world: to travel through time. Cheers Artemis.
Let’s give him a helping hand.
The Lie: 88mph + Flux Capacitor = A Fast Pass into the Past
Our first thought was to strap him into a Delorean and get him up to 88 miles per hour – that’s the magic number, right? So long as you have your flux capacitor hooked up (otherwise half of our motorways would be jammed with time-hopping cars), just hit that golden speed and you’re ready to go. Things turned out to be a little more complicated than that… but we still went looking for a way to accelerate into the past.
The Solution: Hang on to Your Coat; We’re Moving at the Speed of Light
If you’re sat at your computer screen shouting ‘Speed of Light’, check over your shoulder to see no one noticed, then give yourself a point. Well, better make that half a point, since no speed we could ever reach would send us flying backwards through time. However, move fast enough and we might be able to travel forwards in time instead.
Everybody’s favourite pop-scientist Professor ‘that hair’ Cox has said that: ‘As you approach the speed of light, your clock runs so slow you could come back 10,000 years in the future.’
And this effect isn’t relegated to the realms of sci-fi novels or pontificating professors – it’s already happening. Sort of. Because you don’t have to actually hit the speed of light to start moving faster than time itself, astronauts going at incredible speeds have already technically become time-travellers (or ‘experienced time dilation’ if you want to sound all professional about it). If you’re wondering why this news isn’t splashed across the front pages, well… the record is a pretty disappointing 0.02 seconds.
“As you approach the speed of light, your clock runs so slow you could come back 10,000 years in the future.” – Professor Brian Cox
Sadly, any attempts to travel at the speed of light would not just require an infinite amount of energy… it would also produce radiation in the kinds of quantity that melt people into puddles of goo.
The last remains of Test Pilot no.1.
The Lie: A Black Hole = Your Own Personal Portal
So if we can’t get Artemis into the future via conventional time machine methods, how about just chucking him straight into the heart of one of those devilish black holes? If you’ve seen Interstellar (spoilers ahead) then you’ll know that this is Mathew McConaughey’s time travel method of choice, but will it be any good for us?
For now, the answer is a pretty confusing maybe. Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains that if a black hole were to contain access to higher dimensions, as it does in the movie, then sure – we could probably manipulate time as easily as we currently move through space.
Even scientists don’t really know what’s inside a black hole – so a time portal really is a possibility. (Stephen Hawking says so.)
The problem is this: nobody actually knows for sure what might be contained within a black hole. So sure, it could be access to a time portal, the likes of which we never thought possible. But it could equally contain the crushing weight of 1000 suns. Artemis doesn’t want to take the risk. Wuss.
Oh… and also the remains of test pilots 2, 3 and 4. Oops.
The Solution: Hope you don’t get Travel Sick, we’re Going for a Spin!
However, black holes could hold another, slightly less risky possibility. Stephen Hawking has suggested that simply flying around a black hole could be enough. “Imagine they circled the black hole for five of their years. Ten years would pass elsewhere. When they got home, everyone on Earth would have aged five years more than they had.”
To make this happen, Artemis is going to have to travel pretty quickly – but he won’t need to reach the speed of light itself. It will still take a whole lot of energy, but not an infinite supply: this is probably going to be the best chance we’ll get.
We asked for a postcard, but apparently ‘space stamps’ aren’t a thing outside of Men in Black.
The Lie: Everything Will be Fine When You Make it Back to Earth
It’s going to be a while before Artemis comes home to regale us with stories of deepest, darkest space, but what can he expect to find when he gets here – applause, awards and a flurry of newspaper of coverage? While he might be hailed as a hero in astronaut circles, people are probably going to be a little bit less impressed by his new time-travel credentials.
This is because, by many people’s standards, although Artemis will have travelled forwards through time he won’t really have experienced time travel – or at least, not as we like to imagine it on the big screen.
(This might all seem a bit unfair since a similar method of time travel was used in Planet of the Damn Dirty Apes) Ultimately when Artemis arrives in the future he’ll be… a little younger than if he’d just waited around on Earth.
Stop the Press: Area Man Slightly Younger than Anticipated...
For a lot of us, time travel doesn’t really feel like it counts unless you can actually get back to the present day to show off your new knowledge of future lands. So far, the science doesn’t appear to be on our side – there are no convincing theories which would make backwards time-travel possible. Idiots.
Then again, that might be a good thing after all. Because when you move backwards through time, a whole bunch of problems emerge…
The Truth: The Grandfather Paradox (or, How I Killed My Grandfather and Got Away With It)
Imagine if we sent Artemis’ spaceship soaring backwards through time, only to have him crash land on the house where his young Grandfather lives. Nobody can survive that sort of an impact, and without his Grandfather there to carry on the bloodline Artemis is never going to exist at all.
Whoops.
In fact, this is pretty much the premise which underpins the first Back to the Future movie – when Marty McFly travels into the past he inadvertently stops the sequence of events that led to his parents getting together.
He might be able to use his cunning and clever quips to resolve things, but even the tiniest change could mean that when you return to the present, the whole world has been changed. Ever see that Tree House of Horror where Homer… well, this:
The Solution: When in Doubt, Just ask a Scientist
If this sounds slightly terrifying then we may have good news: scientists think they may have a solution for the Grandfather Paradox after all! The idea is that if Artemis went back in time and inadvertently killed his Grandfather, he wouldn’t alter our universe… he’d create a whole new offshoot universe, allowing the two separate possibilities to co-exist at the same time (science people like to call this a ‘Closed Time-like Curve’).
When he travelled back to the present day, he’d hop back over into the original universe. Problem solved, awkward family dinners averted. Phew.
Your Planet Needs YOU
So, is time travel possible? If you don’t fancy accelerating to the speed of light then going for a cruise around a black hole is probably your safest bet, while diving straight into one could still be a possibility for the stupid and the brave! And maybe that guy from N’Sync who wasn’t allowed to go into space.
Anyway, we’re still waiting on a solution for backwards time travel, so if you just got here from the future then please give us a call and tell us how it’s done – you can contact us at 0121 327 3273. Just promise to keep all of those Walking Dead spoilers strictly to yourself.
