Speaker 1: Yeah, Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: This is awesome that I'm like the science editor how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com and this is Robert Lambstein's writer
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. And this week we
Speaker 1: are talking about time travel. Yes, in two parts, right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna tackle traveling into the past. But first in
Speaker 1: this podcast, we're gonna tackle traveling into the future, which
Speaker 1: is a pretty common element in science fiction, television shows, music,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Have you ever wanted to travel into the future. Well,
Speaker 1: aside from the very slow pace at which we're traveling
Speaker 1: into the future right now, I was going to actually
Speaker 1: mention that, um, no, I don't really want to travel
Speaker 1: in the future. You wouldn't want to meet your future
Speaker 1: self if you're not curious about Robert lamb and no,
Speaker 1: because every all sorts of horrible things happen when you
Speaker 1: meet your future self. You know you've seen time cop
Speaker 1: right now, you haven't seen but like like to Yeah,
Speaker 1: this one's Jehan Cleon van Dam and like the bad
Speaker 1: spoiler alert, but the bad guy ends up meeting himself
Speaker 1: in the future and they're like scheme for a while,
Speaker 1: but then they get kicked into each other and they
Speaker 1: like melt and stuff, so you know, it just doesn't
Speaker 1: look pleasant. Plus most of the time, traveling into the
Speaker 1: future ends up going to some horrible place with you know,
Speaker 1: robots and dystopian you know, system of government and you know,
Speaker 1: the apocalypse and all. Plus you have more of a
Speaker 1: zen o. Look, if I'm reading that correctly, where you
Speaker 1: like to sort of just exist more in the present,
Speaker 1: is that true? Um? No, I like, well, I like
Speaker 1: that idea. You know, obviously I'm no sin Master, so
Speaker 1: um Robert Lamb science writer and zin master. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, traveling into the future I guess would be
Speaker 1: kind of cool if you could just it's just some
Speaker 1: any problems come with it, which we'll get into here.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, at the very basics though, um, you know,
Speaker 1: we are all traveling into the future. That's what's happening.
Speaker 1: Like just then, I just traveled into the future a
Speaker 1: little bit, So it's hard not to get stuck on it.
Speaker 1: Get the passage of time. Yeah, Like if when you
Speaker 1: get get down to it, you know, it's like the
Speaker 1: present that we exist, so we don't really experience we
Speaker 1: only think about the passing moment, and then you know,
Speaker 1: and then you know that's and then that one little
Speaker 1: moment that's where we spend all this time thinking about
Speaker 1: the future, remembering the past as it happens. Though, we
Speaker 1: can sort of control the speed at which we travel
Speaker 1: into the future, or at least the speed that we
Speaker 1: experience it at um, thanks to a little something called relativity. Um.
Speaker 1: Einstein has a pretty famous quote on this. He says, quote,
Speaker 1: put your hand on a hot stove for a minute,
Speaker 1: and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty
Speaker 1: girl for an hour and it seems like a minute.
Speaker 1: That's relativity. Yeah. Now, I think I would argue with
Speaker 1: Einstein that it depends on the pretty girl, um, because
Speaker 1: what if she's talking about something really boring you know, um.
Speaker 1: And it also brings to mind life if there was
Speaker 1: you know, if you really don't take this too literally,
Speaker 1: because you could not, say, build a time machine by
Speaker 1: just like filling it with beautiful women, you know, and
Speaker 1: having them like talk at you. Likewise, you couldn't live
Speaker 1: forever by constantly burning yourself. But but there are some
Speaker 1: other things that actually do have major effects on the
Speaker 1: passage of time. Yeah. One of the big ones of
Speaker 1: course quite literally is mass like the physical mass of something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this one, this one one that really really kind
Speaker 1: of blows my mind a little. Um Like global positioning
Speaker 1: satellites they gain about like a third of a billion
Speaker 1: second every day, and that's one of the contributing reasons here,
Speaker 1: is that they're farther away from the Earth from it
Speaker 1: from its center of mass, which drags on time and
Speaker 1: slows it down so um. And then there was a
Speaker 1: I think it was Stephen Hawkey makes a great analogy
Speaker 1: with or a great you know comparison with like the pyramid,
Speaker 1: like large you know, like one of the great pyramids,
Speaker 1: large center of mass, and if you're standing next to that, um,
Speaker 1: time is going to happen slower for you then it
Speaker 1: would if you're standing like out in the you know,
Speaker 1: in the waist, it would you know, not not in
Speaker 1: a sense that you could actually detect or experience, but
Speaker 1: that it would be there. So to actually travel into
Speaker 1: the future with it, with any you know, in any
Speaker 1: kind of meaningful way, you would need like an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of mass though, like a black hole. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like you could go and do laps around it. Essentially
Speaker 1: right right, a supermassive black hole perhaps, Yeah, like there's
Speaker 1: probably one kicking around the center of our galaxy. Yeah, see,
Speaker 1: what would happen if you circled the black hole for
Speaker 1: a couple of years without falling in? If that's a
Speaker 1: key part, you'd return to uh an Earth where an
Speaker 1: entire decade had passed. Yeah. Yeah, it's just you know,
Speaker 1: you would you would experience like a year, they would
Speaker 1: experience a decade. You would have aged a decade, they
Speaker 1: would have aged a century. So it seems kind of
Speaker 1: like it's it's even like explaining it and having read
Speaker 1: the explanations for it, it it still kind of sounds like magic.
Speaker 1: But it's just I mean, it's it's it's physics at work.
Speaker 1: Um now. And and of course, another interesting one is
Speaker 1: the way speed alters time. It's called time dilation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this was pretty snazzy. Has yet to work its way
Speaker 1: into like a major movie plot. Um. I was talking
Speaker 1: to a friend about this. We're like, man, they never
Speaker 1: worked time dilation into into a thriller, you know, because
Speaker 1: it's such the thing. It's like such a slight change,
Speaker 1: but this is one that we can actually measure. Um.
Speaker 1: All right, so time passes slower the closer you appro.
Speaker 1: It's the speed of light. So if you have two
Speaker 1: identical clocks, you leave one at the station, you put
Speaker 1: one on a speeding train, right the uh than the
Speaker 1: one than the At the end of that train trip,
Speaker 1: the one that remained at the station would be just
Speaker 1: like a billionth of a second um ahead of the
Speaker 1: one that was on the train. Okay, now that's not
Speaker 1: a lot. Uh. You know, even if you spent your
Speaker 1: whole life on it's not even enough to blink. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like you couldn't get like really paranoid and be like
Speaker 1: that's it. I'm gonna live on a speeding bullet train
Speaker 1: the rest of my life, and I'm gonna live forever.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna happen. You'd have to if the train
Speaker 1: could maybe attain like nine point nine speed light speed,
Speaker 1: which is like ridiculous uh speed, you know, impossible, you know,
Speaker 1: certainly with any foreseeable technology that we have right now,
Speaker 1: perhaps and particle accelerators. Yeah yeah, well that's true. That's true,
Speaker 1: and that's really not commercially Yeah, I don't have a
Speaker 1: particle accelerator in my backyard, do you No, But at
Speaker 1: that speed, one year would pass on board, Um, you're
Speaker 1: accelerated train for every two D and twenty three years
Speaker 1: that passed back the train stations. Insane. So yeah, you
Speaker 1: could essentially, like any year's time, you get on board
Speaker 1: your time machine and then travel for a year, and
Speaker 1: then you would essentially travel two d twenty three years
Speaker 1: into the future. So that's ah, that's pretty fascinating. And yeah,
Speaker 1: there's actually, uh, you know, some some more evidence for this,
Speaker 1: uh in some of our observations we've made with particle accelerators.
Speaker 1: Sure over it, certain they've been checking into this, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They have these extremely short lived particles called pie masons,
Speaker 1: and ordinarily they disintegrate after just five billions of a second,
Speaker 1: but you accelerate them near light speed and they last
Speaker 1: thirty times longer. Wow, that's practically a practically nothing still true,
Speaker 1: but still it shows that, I mean, it's proof positive
Speaker 1: that that it's this can be done, whether it can
Speaker 1: ever be done in a way that actually allows human
Speaker 1: time travel. Uh, you know, we'll see. Okay, so we
Speaker 1: get on a really fast train, and that's one way
Speaker 1: we could travel into the future. And by really fast,
Speaker 1: of course, we mean something approaching the speed of light,
Speaker 1: which it's not really on the table now. So what
Speaker 1: about another possibility like wormholes, which we are also going
Speaker 1: to get into in the Traveling Back in Time podcast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a yes, a some physicist I believe that in
Speaker 1: the quantum foam, which is this tiny, tiny environment, smallest
Speaker 1: environment in the universe, they're just constantly wormholes popping into
Speaker 1: existence um linking one portion of space time with another
Speaker 1: portion of space time. And that conceivably we could sort
Speaker 1: of grab onto one of these holes before it disappears
Speaker 1: enlarged enough to fly say a spaceship through it, and
Speaker 1: in while I we'd come out somewhere some wind else
Speaker 1: it right at another invent in spacetime. Yeah, and of
Speaker 1: course that brings a number of problems with it, you know,
Speaker 1: like how how do you choose which a little tiny
Speaker 1: momentary hole in space time to expand? And then how
Speaker 1: do you crawl through it? And how do you expand
Speaker 1: in the first place? And uh yeah, and how do
Speaker 1: you not end up in some like horrible like hell world,
Speaker 1: you know, just like in the movies. That's what happens
Speaker 1: in the movies is on setting so watch out. So yes,
Speaker 1: time travel in the future is possible to eliminate extent.
Speaker 1: We're doing it right now. If you if you hop
Speaker 1: on a train, or if you're listening to this on
Speaker 1: on an airplane or in the car, you are experiencing
Speaker 1: it as well. Perhaps that's not the answer you were
Speaker 1: looking for. Perhaps you're looking to jet a century ahead
Speaker 1: or a few millennia ahead, and that's not really the
Speaker 1: case quite yet, right, do not go stand next to
Speaker 1: a pyramid and and blame us. Of course, if you
Speaker 1: really love formans, then time might speed up, just like
Speaker 1: Einstein sitting with this pretty girl. So on that note,
Speaker 1: do we have any listener mail to get into? Grab
Speaker 1: a few letters? Uh? Sitting around here? Don't we? We? Do?
Speaker 1: We do? Do you want to read in this seek? Sure?
Speaker 1: What have we got right? This one comes from Calum
Speaker 1: aged fourteen. Hi, Allison and Robert. I'm a new listener,
Speaker 1: but downloaded some of your back episodes of which I
Speaker 1: really like. I'd like to bring up the episode Amazing Infestations.
Speaker 1: You remember that one? That was a fun one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this isn't a complaint. I really like your podcast and
Speaker 1: all of the house stuff works podcasts. Admittedly, rats are
Speaker 1: classed as vermin, but they also make amazing pets. They're
Speaker 1: cute and as almost intelligent as dogs. They can swim
Speaker 1: half a mile without stopping and tread water for three hours.
Speaker 1: I've never tried this out. I have three rats, Smudge, Blizzard,
Speaker 1: and Cleopatra Cleo for short, and have included photos so
Speaker 1: that you can see the rat that rats are cute
Speaker 1: and not all vermin. Cleo is my favorite. Yeah, Cleo
Speaker 1: is pretty cute. They're all cute, all like white rats,
Speaker 1: you know. Uh, sorry for that the photos are blurry,
Speaker 1: but the rats are fast runners. Thank you for reading
Speaker 1: this email from the signs it so so yeah and
Speaker 1: they yeah, he included photos of all the rats and
Speaker 1: they were they were cute and uh and certainly that's
Speaker 1: something worth mentioning, is that even though you know, pretty
Speaker 1: much with any of these species that had become a problem,
Speaker 1: a lot of it can be traced back to to
Speaker 1: humans causing some imbalance in the in the environment. You know, um,
Speaker 1: like at the very heart of things, like you have
Speaker 1: like a dense metropolitan area, like a medieval city, where
Speaker 1: everything's dirty and wretched and there's food or available, and
Speaker 1: you have rats, you know, an explosion of raps living
Speaker 1: in the area. But you can't blame the rats. They're
Speaker 1: just you know, responding to the environment that humans have
Speaker 1: artificially created. Well then also you think about those Christmas
Speaker 1: crabs that were overrunning Easter Island, you remember those that
Speaker 1: we talked about those, and that infestation is a natural thing.
Speaker 1: It's short lived, it happens, and admittedly it's probably a
Speaker 1: little unsettling for your house to be overrun by Christmas crabs,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't happen for a long time. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: there's actually some remember reading some some stuff about the
Speaker 1: Christmas crabs claiming that that that it happened because of
Speaker 1: you know, some particular species ended up being eliminated due
Speaker 1: to you know, some other species being introduced on the island.
Speaker 1: And then there's another invasive species that's uh, just like
Speaker 1: hurting the crabs. Now it's you know, hurting the crabs
Speaker 1: are hurting the crabs like like an Australian I like
Speaker 1: the idea of the hurting that would be that would
Speaker 1: be amusing. It would be like the there was an
Speaker 1: old lady who's falled a fly. You know, Christmas crabs
Speaker 1: are out of hands. They bring on the wolves to
Speaker 1: herd them around and then they have heard the wolves.
Speaker 1: But anyway, cute rats. Yeah, and we always like hearing
Speaker 1: from listeners. So thanks for writing, Calem and we hope
Speaker 1: you said your name right. So and everyone out there,
Speaker 1: be sure and check out our Facebook and Twitter accounts. Sure,
Speaker 1: we're on stuff in the Science Lab and love stuff
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Speaker 1: do one. And if you guys want to send us
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