The manipulation of time PERCEPTION is an idea I have speculated on in the past, simply speaking you are asleep or dead (in magnetic suspended animation) for long periods of time, interspaced with extremely short flashes of lucid consciousness as you cross the vastness of the universe.
To you the spaceman, the journey might seem only a year or so in duration when in fact it took a billion years to get to your destination in some far away galaxy. Sadly you can never return home
Above comments by Alan
Death and Time Traveling
Duty Cycle time travel
Perhaps the most fascinating way to travel though spacetime involves using duty cycles. Although natural biological life-forms cannot take advantage of duty-cycle time traveling, (I DONT SEE WHY NOT!) it will apply itself best to cybernetic forms of life. The term "duty cycle" comes from electrical engineering terminology. (No, it does
not mean
Howdy Doody's bicycle.)
A duty cycle represents a periodic ratio of on and off states. Usually duty cycles get represented as square waves or rectangular pulses. If you've ever operated your microwave oven at 50% power, or adjusted the thermostat on your air-conditioner, you'd realize that they operate by turning on for a period of time and off for a period of time. Microwaves, stepper motors, power drills, as well as many computer controlled devices use duty cycle power controls.
An example graph of a 50% duty cycle showing 5 on-states looks like the following:
Now that you understand duty cycles, imagine a cybernetic space-traveler that controls its own duty cycle to match the aims of its voyage. Since it utilizes electrical circuits, sensors, and software for its intelligence, it can switch its "brain" on and off almost instantly.
The on-state part of the duty cycle represents the conscious state and the off-state as the time suspended (death) state similar to our human based thought experiment.
Important to the concept, you should understand that the off-state part of the duty cycle would remain off for extremely long periods of time, perhaps hundreds or thousands of years, while each on-state may last only a second or a fraction of a second.
However, since only the on-states get perceived, conscious time would appear seamless to the time-traveler. The duty cycle from the perspective of an outside observer for the spacetime voyager might look like this:
Interesting a new take on this vexing topic, what do you guys think?
Alan