Time Travel: How far are we?

Great Scott! Its 2015 already. So that means this is going to be the year of hoverboards, 3D hologram billboards, self-tying shoelaces and Pepsi Perfect. But most importantly, considering all the back and forth time travelling that Marty McFly and Doc Brown get to, this was supposed to be the year of time travel as well.

While a souped-up DeLorean travelling at 88mph was enough to catapult the McFly-Brown duo through the folds of space and time, how far along are we on that route in real life?

As far as theory is concerned, there are quite a few ways we can travel through time- both forwards and back. Among the most popular is the warmhole theory proposed by our favorite messy haired nerd- Albert Einstein. He suggested the existence of wormholes (or, more formally, Einstein-Rosen Bridge) that can essentially connect two distance points in space and time via a shortcut. To put it simply, imagine a piece of paper with two points, A and B, marked on the top and the bottom. Now, to move from A to B, we'd have to travel the entire distance between these points.

However, if the page was folded such that the two points are connected, then we could travel instantaneously between the two. This, in essence, is the logic behind wormhole based time travel.

There are problems though- we have zero practical evidence of wormholes existing, and we haven't yet been able to generate a wormhole by ourselves either. And even if we did, we could only travel as far back into time as the point when the wormhole was created. So, climbing into a portal through space-time and going frolicking with the dinosaurs is still very much in the realms of fantasy.

There's another way you could, at least theoretically, be a time traveler. And that'd be to go out into space and keep orbiting a black hole until time actually starts going in reverse. The density of a super massive black hole can have significant impact on time- according to theories, If a spaceship were to orbit a black hole, those on board would only experience eight minutes of time for every 16-minute orbit.

In words of our other favorite nerd, Stephen Hawking, "Around and around they'd go, experiencing just half the time of everyone far away from the black hole. The ship and its crew would be travelling through time. Imagine they circled the black hole for five years. Ten years would pass elsewhere. When they got home, everyone on Earth would have aged five years more that they had."

The problem: black holes have significantly more attractive power than Emilia Clarke in all her Khaleesi glory, and as such, chances are your spaceship would respond to the attraction like a moth diving for flames and be dragged down into the black abyss, never to be seen again.

And if that deters you, there's always the option to travel in something that can outpace even light. It means you'd need to move at speeds exceeding 299,792 km per second. The idea is that if you can move fast enough, the clocks will become slow relative to people who are slow. Move faster than the speed of light and the clocks could slow down enough that you could potentially come back a few thousand years in the future.

The only issue is that one of the most fundamental principles of physics states that nothing can travel as fast as the speed of light. But maybe, if you could kidnap Flash, Speedy Gonzalez and the RoadRunner and duct tape them to your rocket powered Bugatti, maybe you could make some headway into hurtling through time.

While there are a myriad other theories of time travel that have been testified and vouched, we still haven't made much headway into implementing these theories in real life. Chances are that time travelling may never be practically possible. But then again, stranger things have happened.

If only there was a way to fast forward to the point when time travelling is possible!