This is what makes time travel possible: the... really big spaceship?

I once wrote a paper in college explaining why time travel is impossible. Apparently, Stephen Hawking is now trying to one-up me in a battle of wits. We'll see who wins, Mr. Smarty Pants... once I find my thesis and post it here, it's on!

Read Hawking's theory below. It sounds entirely plausible... eventually.

According to Stephen Hawking, one of the world's smartest physicists, time travel might be possible. Hawking doesn't hold out much hope for time traveling through wormholes, even though he muses about the fantastic conditions that might someday make them work. Nor does he think we'll ever be able to travel back in time, because of paradoxes. His example: "What if a scientist travels back in time and shoots his earlier self? He is now dead. So who fired the shot? It's a paradox."

Traveling forward in time is another matter. Hawking says it would be possible if you could build a gigantic spacecraft, "a truly enormous machine," carrying a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate it for six years at full power. That would bring it to a velocity almost as fast as the speed of light.

"At this speed, a single day on board is a whole year of Earth time. Our ship would be truly flying into the future. The slowing of time has another benefit. It means we could, in theory, travel extraordinary distances within one lifetime. A trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years."

Courtesy of DVICE.