Einstein’s theory might actually explain how some folks have already time-travelled

If you’ve ever dreamed of being the first person to travel through time, it might be time to reset that goal — scientists now believe it’s already happened.

Most of us grew up watching Back to the Future and imagining what it would be like to hop through time like Marty McFly. But while the real-world version may not involve a tricked-out DeLorean flying through timelines, researchers say time travel could be very real — and it’s already been done.

It’s something people have fantasized about for decades. And it might surprise many to learn that, according to science, time travel has already been achieved in a practical — although less flashy — way.

Now, you might be thinking that if this were true, we’d all be hearing about it nonstop. There’d be headlines everywhere, right?

But it turns out time travel isn’t as dramatic as stepping into a machine and jumping into the past or future. It’s more about the physics of moving through space and time itself.

This all ties back to Albert Einstein’s special relativity theory, which he introduced in 1905.

Einstein explained in his theory that time doesn’t tick the same for everyone — it moves relative to the observer. Here on Earth, we’re all traveling through time at roughly the same rate.

However, when someone moves at extremely high speeds, they actually move through time more quickly than those who remain still.

That’s where space travel comes in. Astronauts orbiting Earth at speeds of 17,500 mph are technically moving through time faster than we are — which, in a very real sense, makes them time travelers.

This phenomenon could help explain why astronauts who spend a lot of time in orbit age more slowly than the rest of us down here on Earth.

For instance, when Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth after spending over nine months at the International Space Station, their bodies had technically experienced slightly less time than ours. Their experience of time was a bit shorter than ours on the ground — just because they were moving faster.

By this logic, astronauts like them qualify as real-life time travelers.

The BBC once put it simply by saying that people in space “are spending more of their budget on speed than us and so have less to spend on time.”

This strange effect is known as time dilation, and the case of astronaut twins Mark and Scott Kelly really highlights it.

Both brothers have traveled to space, but Scott stayed at the International Space Station much longer — about ten times longer than Mark.

Even though Mark was born six minutes before Scott, he’s now technically six minutes and five milliseconds older. That’s because Scott aged just a tiny bit slower while orbiting Earth.

This bizarre difference was actually studied and recorded by NASA in their famous Twins Study.

To break it down: the faster you travel toward the speed of light, the slower you age compared to someone who’s not moving as fast. It’s wild, but it’s science.

Sure, it sounds a little hard to wrap your head around. But that’s science for you — fascinating, complicated, and never quite what you expect.