But what would happen if we created something that could go much faster than geostationary orbit? We’re not talking a commercial jetliner (550 to 600 miles an hour) or a 21st-century rocket to the ISS (25,000 miles per hour), but something that could approach 186,282 miles per second. That isn’t very fast, at least in comparison to the speed of light. Returning to our time-traveling cosmonaut Padalka, his 1/44th-second jump into the future is so minuscule because he was only traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. In fact, not only is time travel possible, it’s already happened-it just doesn’t look like your typical sci-fi film. Real astrophysicists like Gott are pretty sure they know how to build a time machine, and intense speed-much, much faster than Padalka’s orbital jaunt-is the key ingredient. While being a fraction of a second younger than if he had stayed on Earth isn’t mind-bending stuff, it nonetheless gave Padalka the distinction of the “current time traveler record,” according to Gott.Īlthough not exactly a plutonium-charged DeLorean, time travel is anything but fiction.

Richard Gott, Princeton physicist and author of the 2001 book Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe. Padalka came back from his adventures, he found the Earth to be 1/44th of a second to the future of where he expected it to be,” explains J. And because of these 2.5 years spent orbiting the planet at high speeds, Padalka also became a time traveler, experiencing Einstein’s theory of general relativity in action.

He had just completed his sixth mission in space, and broke the record for the most cumulative time spent beyond Earth’s atmosphere: 879 days. In September 2015, cosmonaut Gennady Padalka arrived back on Earth for the last time.

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