Mission to Mars

We all complain about needing more time: time to sleep, time to study and time to stalk our classmates on Facebook. Apparently our complaints have been heard, as scientists have just created a 25-hour day. The hard part will be getting Earth and the sun to cooperate.

While adding an extra hour may be difficult on Earth, since even Wal-Mart is only open for 24 hours, the experiment was designed to get the human body adjusted to the 25-hour days found on Mars. The study involved 12 people living in a controlled environment without any time clues, such as windows or clocks, for 65 days. The participants followed regular time in the beginning, but later the researchers delivered two pulses of light at the end of the "day," which tricked the participants’ internal clocks and allowed them to stay awake an extra hour. This method could be used to keep astronauts from getting jetlag when traveling to Mars — whenever we get there.

By going to Mars, we'd essentially gain more Earth-time, as days are slower on the red planet. I’m not sure how many days the average person would want to spend on Mars, though, since there’s nothing to do there yet; really, Mars would be more boring than Boca. Anyway, this is similar to how a time-traveling device, i.e. a time machine, would operate.

To travel forward in time, we would just need to travel close to the speed of light for a while and then come back to Earth, physicist Brian Greene told LiveScience. Of course, this is easier said than done, but at least it works on paper. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work for traveling back in time. This means that if you really, really want to go to the future, you’ll have to learn to love it, since there’s no going back.

Time is considered to be the fourth dimension — the other three being length, width and height. While it is possible to move the first three backward and forward, time can only move forward. Thus, we cannot make time move backward, nor can we make it stop, no matter how much we may want to or how hard we try.

That said, the most developed way to travel back in time is to find a wormhole, or a tunnel which connects two areas of time and space. Unfortunately, no one is really sure if wormholes exist — not even the writers of Star Trek, who greatly depend on the wormhole in Deep Space Nine — and no one knows if our future selves have yet accomplished this task.

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking once asked in a PBS special, "Time travel might be possible, but if that is the case why haven't we been overrun by tourists from the future?"

He makes a good point. We have enough problems with tourists from other states, let alone tourists from other eras. While these future-people may be able to help us in ways we can’t even imagine, they may choose to travel to our time just to laugh at us and our primitive ways. You know you’d do the same thing if you could, and then probably post the photos on Facebook.