The other day, I was watching a show on time travel. At one point, they talked about how time travel is possible, by traveling through space at high speeds. But it's a case of time moving slower for the traveler, than for those not traveling.
In other words, if I take off in a space ship and you stay here ... the faster I travel ... when I return, you have aged more than I have. Because the faster I travel, the slower my time moves.
I thought the concept was interesting. Especially if you apply it to the thought of space aliens visiting the Earth. It would mean that either:
(1) They travel in FTL (Faster Than Light) ships, or
(2) Have technology to "warp" space.
If they travel in FTL ships, that would mean by the time they got here, everybody they knew on their home planet was probably dead. All the technology of their ships would be out of date. Or maybe their civilization even ceased to exist, destroyed by war or disasters. It would also mean that, by the time they could communicate their findings to their home planet, it would be out of date. Our technology and culture would have drastically changed, as well. So, with FTL travel, there's really no point of studying life on other planets.
On a side note, this brings up a problem with StarWars. Their ships travel FTL. Yet by the time a fleet would arrive at a destination across the galaxy, things would have changed drastically. Take the point of the Rebels attacking the Death Star. With FTL travel, by the time they got the intelligence ... let alone got their fleet there to attack it ... it would have been finished. Because time would have moved faster for the Death Star, than for the Rebel ships.
The second option - "warping" space - solves the problem of travelers being "out of phase" with the rest of civilization. The traveler uses either a wormhole or similar technology to travel outside normal space/time. That way, they can travel large distances without little or no time passing.
Another side note, is that this is the method used in StarTrek and Babylon5. Since the "warping" technology is also used for their communications, they can communicate instantly across those distances, as well.
Source: http://unclewaltmusing.blogspot.com/2010/08/space-aliens-ufos.html
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