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Cinders said:
Time is relative. It goes faster, or slower, depending on your center of gravity. Synchronize an atomic watch with a friend. Then, have that friend get in an airplane for an hour. After s/he lands, compare your times. You'll find that your friend's watch is a couple of milliseconds ahead of your watch. The reason for this is because gravity affects time like it affects everything else around it. Things bend around a center of gravity - it's why satellites and planets orbit instead of crash into the body they're orbiting. The closer you get to the event horizon of a black hole, the slower time becomes. Now assuming you could physically survive being so near to the crushing magnitude of that phenomenon, let's place an astronaut relatively close to that event horizon (yes, physically impossible, but urso with me). Have that astronaut's lifeline be tethered to a ship that is hanging out MUCH farther away from the black hole, at a seguro distance. From the spaceship's perspective, stay there for twenty years, refueling and re-staffing as needed, but keep that astronaut out there, tethered. Finally, you reel him in. From his perspective, he has been out there for an hour. Comfortable. Maybe a little hungry. But for the people on the ship, twenty years have passed. That sounds like time travel to me. This is a drastic example. Nothing in nature (outside of a black hole) has THIS big of an effect on time. And even if it did, it would have to have the same drastic effect on everything ELSE around it (matter, energy, space, etc) JUST like a black hole. Which is why man-made time travel in that way is probably never going to happen. But DOES it happen, in nature? CAN it happen? Of course. We time travel every time we step foot on an airplane. But the "leap" into the future is so insignificant, it doesn't even register.
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