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Originally Posted by DVTimes
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Hawking believes time travel is possible but only in one direction - forward. He supposes a spacecraft that could travel at a speed approaching the speed of light - 12 years to reach 98% light speed, at that point each day on the spacecraft would be one earth year.
Kind of a cheesy kind of time travel - much easier I think for us to figure out how to freeze people and then awaken them in the future. His scenario is some epic disaster that destroys humanity where these time travellers would return to Earth to repopulate it. If I were on that spaceship I'd want no part of that job, starting human civilization from scratch in god knows what kind of environment the planet would be in would be a nightmare.
I still really don't have a handle on the concept of 'time' the way physicists think of it. To me it's man made concept, we decided one revolution of the earth, sunrise to sunrise, is one day/24 hours. That time is slower/faster for different observers doesn't seem like such a major scientific breakthrough to me but when I read about Einstein's theories of relativity it's lauded as an incredible leap forward that we've reaped a ton of technological advancements from.