Building a time machine that travels into the future is not science fiction - if you are a multi-trillionaire, a physics expert says.
Dr Craig Savage, who lectures in relativity and quantum mechanics at the Australian National University, said it was possible for people to travel forward in time but the costs involved were too great.
"If you could build a spaceship that could go three quarters of the speed of light you would time travel one hour into the future for every hour of your time," he said.
"People have designed such spacecrafts at various times but they would just be unimaginably expensive to create.
The cost of operating a time travelling machine, in relation to the cost of electricity, would be ten trillion dollars, Dr Savage estimates.
"We are talking vasts amounts of wealth that would be involved in doing this, Bill Gates could not even consider this."
Dr Savage said that due to the cost, not the science, people will not be travelling through time in the foreseeable future.
"If an individual was going to time travel into the future they would have to have enough wealth to spend on this that was the same amount as 10 years of Australia's GDP," he said.
"The question is when will individuals be that wealthy? Certainly not in our lifetime."
Dr Savage said people who might be able to muster the resources for time travel in the future would be so advanced they would be unrecognisable.
"It's hard to imagine what the future would be like where something like time travel into the future would be economically feasible.
"It would be an utterly different kind of world that we live in at the moment.
"This kind of question takes science to the limits."
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