The difference that low earth orbit makes in an astronaut's life span may be negligible — better suited

for jokes among siblings than actual life extension or visiting the distant future — but the dilation in time
between people on Earth and GPS satellites flying through space does make a difference.

Read more: Can we stop time?

The Global Positioning System, or GPS, helps us know exactly where we are by communicating with a
network of a few dozen satellites positioned in a high Earth orbit. The satellites circle the planet from
12,500 miles (20,100 kilometers) away, moving at 8,700 mph (14,000 km/h).

According to special relativity, the faster an object moves relative to another object, the slower that first
object experiences time. For GPS satellites with atomic clocks, this effect cuts 7 microseconds, or 7
millionths of a second, off each day, according to American Physical Society publication Physics Central.

Read more: Could Star Trek's faster-than-light warp drive actually work?

Then, according to general relativity, clocks closer to the center of a large gravitational mass like Earth
tick more slowly than those farther away. So, because the GPS satellites are much farther from the
center of Earth compared to clocks on the surface, Physics Central added, that adds another 45
microseconds onto the GPS satellite clocks each day. Combined with the negative 7 microseconds from
the special relativity calculation, the net result is an added 38 microseconds.

This means that in order to maintain the accuracy needed to pinpoint your car or phone — or, since the
system is run by the U.S. Department of Defense, a military drone — engineers must account for an
extra 38 microseconds in each satellite's day. The atomic clocks onboard don’t tick over to the next day
until they have run 38 microseconds longer than comparable clocks on Earth.

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Given those numbers, it would take more than seven years for the atomic clock in a GPS satellite to
unsync itself from an Earth clock by more than a blink of an eye. (We did the math: If you estimate a
blink to last at least 100,000 microseconds, as the Harvard Database of Useful Biological Numbers does,
it would take thousands of days for those 38 microsecond shifts to add up.)
This kind of time travel may seem as negligible as the Kelly brothers' age gap, but given the hyper-
accuracy of modern GPS technology, it actually does matter. If it can communicate with the satellites
whizzing overhead, your phone can nail down your location in space and time with incredible accuracy.

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CAN WORMHOLES TAKE US BACK IN TIME?

General relativity might also provide scenarios that could allow travelers to go back in time, according to
NASA. But the physical reality of those time-travel methods are no piece of cake.

Wormholes are theoretical "tunnels" through the fabric of space-time that could connect different
moments or locations in reality to others. Also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges or white holes, as
opposed to black holes, speculation about wormholes abounds. But despite taking up a lot of space (or
space-time) in science fiction, no wormholes of any kind have been identified in real life.

Related: Best time travel movies

"The whole thing is very hypothetical at this point," Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at
the University of Oregon, told Space.com sister site Live Science. "No one thinks we're going to find a
wormhole anytime soon."

Primordial wormholes are predicted to be just 10^-34 inches (10^-33 centimeters) at the tunnel's
"mouth". Previously, they were expected to be too unstable for anything to be able to travel through
them. However, a new study claims that this is not the case, Live Science reported.

The new theory, which suggests that wormholes could work as viable space-time shortcuts, was
described by physicist Pascal Koiran. As part of the study, Koiran used the Eddington-Finkelstein metric,
as opposed to the Schwarzschild metric which has been used in the majority of previous analyses.

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In the past, the path of a particle could not be traced through a hypothetical wormhole. However, using
the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, the physicist was able to achieve just that.
Koiran’s paper was described in October 2021, in the preprint database arXiv, before being published in
the Journal of Modern Physics D.