Sometimes you just wish that you could travel back in time using a time machine and undo all your past mistakes or that you could travel into the future to see the consequences of your decisions so that you could adjust accordingly in the present.

Unfortunately, no such capability exists right now and it seems like we are a long, long ways away from any such technology. That is not to say that time travel is impossible though.

Einstein's theory of special relativity allows for travel to the future but it might not be like how you might have expected. But still, time travel to the future is possible given we are able to travel at close to the speed of light.

It's travelling to the past that is the question and it seems like nature won't allow us to break the linearity of time. Or could it be that we are wrong in our assumption that time is linear? I mean there are theoretical ways one could travel to the past but it would take an insanely advanced amount of technologies to achieve, even if.

Will It Ever Be A Reality?

So, let's first talk about travelling to the future. We know that travelling at ridiculously fast speeds, something like the speed of light, will allow for time dilation to take effect and effectively allow the traveller to travel to the future. We would just need to build spaceships that can go at that kind of speed.

As for time travel to the past, many people believe that since it can cause grave paradoxes that have the potential to mess up the spacetime continuum itself, maybe the laws of physics make it impossible to do so.

But many experts have suggested that it might be possible. Wormholes are often said to be one of the ways we might be able to do so and they are even allowed by Einstein's equations so it might just happen in the future, although none has been observed till date and creating one seems like an impossible task by today's standards.

One other way could be through higher dimensions. If you've watched the movie Interstellar you know what I am talking about. Maybe spacetime is just a giant movie reel and it is possible to move from one time to another just as easily as we do with space. But we would need to have access to higher dimensions to do that about which we have no clue whatsoever.

There are some other theoretical ways too but those are plain impossible, like for example infinitely long spinning cylinders or cosmic threads to manipulate spacetime. As of now, we just don't understand the subject enough to devise any methods to travel to the past.