IT IS POSSIBLE TO TRAVEL TO THE FUTURE ...

We may be able to book our ticket to the future someday -- it'll just be a one-way trip.

In a presentation at the British Science Festival, particle physicist Brian Cox said thattime travel is possible but only in one direction.

"The central question is, can you build a time machine? The answer is yes, you can go into the future," the University of Manchester professor told the audience during his hour-long speech on Tuesday, according to The Telegraph. "You've got almost total freedom of movement in the future."

Cox detailed how time travel to the future is possible under Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Traveling hundreds, or even thousands of years into the future, could be accomplished if someone was traveling at an incredibly fast pace, close to the speed of light.

Coming back from the future or traveling to another point in the past is much less likely, according to Cox.

Relating his theory to the popular British science fiction show "Doctor Who," Cox explained that the time-traveling Doctor would need to find a wormhole in order to return to the past. The theoretical bridge, or shortcut through space-time, proposed under Einstein's general-relativity theory has never been proven to exist. And, even if a wormhole were discovered or created, there's no telling whether humans could actually use it to travel through time.

Cox isn't the only one to theorize that a wormhole could allow time-travelers to travel backward in time. Earlier this year, astrophysicist Eric W. Davis of the EarthTech International Institute for Advanced Studies said that a wormhole would be the best option for back-in-time travel. But, Davis acknowledged, it would "take a Herculean effort to turn a wormhole into a time machine."

Time travel: This one is courtesy Reddit users. The basic idea is that MH370 slipped through a rip in the space-time continuum and landed in the 1970s, where the Americans found it and reverse-engineered the aircraft's technology to create the original Boeing 777 in the 1980s. The other time travel idea was that time travellers from the future came to the present to prevent WWIII, and to avoid time travelling technology from falling into the wrong hands. The poor Freescale employees were again dragged in and made collaborators of these time travellers. Those who spawned the theory claim that the device the time travellers used to make the aircraft jump to the future was damaged. 

The great 20th century scientist Albert Einstein developed a theory called Special Relativity. The ideas of Special Relativity are very hard to imagine because they aren't about what we experience in everyday life, but scientists have confirmed them. This theory says that space and time are really aspects of the same thing—space-time. There's a speed limit of 300,000 kilometers per second (or 186,000 miles per second) for anything that travels through space-time, and light always travels the speed limit through empty space.

Special Relativity also says that a surprising thing happens when you move through space-time, especially when your speed relative to other objects is close to the speed of light. Time goes slower for you than for the people you left behind. You won't notice this effect until you return to those stationary people.

Say you were 15 years old when you left Earth in a spacecraft traveling at about 99.5% of the speed of light (which is much faster than we can achieve now), and celebrated only five birthdays during your space voyage. When you get home at the age of 20, you would find that all your classmates were 65 years old, retired, and enjoying their grandchildren! Because time passed more slowly for you, you will have experienced only five years of life, while your classmates will have experienced a full 50 years.

So, if your journey began in 2003, it would have taken you only 5 years to travel to the year 2053, whereas it would have taken all of your friends 50 years. In a sense, this means you have been time traveling. This is a way of going to the future at a rate faster than 1 hour per hour.

Time travel of a sort also occurs for objects in gravitational fields. Einstein had another remarkable theory called General Relativity, which predicts that time passes more slowly for objects in gravitational fields (like here on Earth) than for objects far from such fields. So there are all kinds of space and time distortions near black holes, where the gravity can be very intense.

In the past few years, some scientists have used those distortions in space-time to think of possible ways time machines could work. Some like the idea of "worm holes," which may be shortcuts through space-time. This and other ideas are wonderfully interesting, but we don't know at this point whether they are possible for real objects. Still the ideas are based on good, solid science. In all time travel theories allowed by real science, there is no way a traveler can go back in time to before the time machine was built.

I am confident time travel into the future is possible, but we would need to develop some very advanced technology to do it. We could travel 10,000 years into the future and age only 1 year during that journey. However, such a trip would consume an extraordinary amount of energy. Time travel to the past is more difficult. We do not understand the science as well.

Actually, scientists and engineers who plan and operate some space missions must account for the time distortions that occur because of both General and Special Relativity. These effects are far too small to matter in most human terms or even over a human lifetime. However, very tiny fractions of a second do matter for the precise work necessary to fly spacecraft throughout the solar system.