I’ve seen things of people aging slower in space, but any time I look it up it always comes with like 15+ words I have to look up to understand or concepts im not aware of. How does this work, and is it considered to be a form of time travel?
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Time is affected by both gravity, and how fast you’re moving. Both of those things are different for the people up in orbit on the International Space Station. Not by much, but by a tiny bit. A very tiny bit. Like, a smaller amount than you could ever notice.
> is it considered to be a form of time travel?
Only really by clickbait articles. Theoretically if you could go fast enough, you could “travel into the future”. As in, you could experience, say, 1 hour on your space ship, while the Earth experiences 1 year. That’s what’s happening when astronauts go into space, except it’s such a small difference as to be essentially meaningless to humans. And of course, if you did travel to “the future” like this, you’d be stuck there.
One area where it DOES matter is in GPS systems. If you’re driving down a motorway in your car, your sat nav knows where you are because of communications with satellites. In this situation, the time difference is big enough that it does actually matter, so scientists have to be very clever and take this into account when designing them.
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