Forget curved spacetime and time travel. This is a little more subtle and yet effective and really quite spectacular.

TimeWarping is used extensively, but it is rarely named.

Sometimes in life there are situations where something is very expensive, but it's likely or possible that in the future that thing will become very much cheaper; and hence much more common.

In those situations it is possible to dimly and imprecisely 'travel into the future', by spending large amounts of money, to obtain it to 'play with'. This is called TimeWarping.

Trivial example - in engineering the first few examples of something are required for testing the equipment as the user would; however because the production line isn't up and running yet; the first few examples often have to be specially built. This is a small example, going just a few weeks or months into the future.

Classic Example: - Xerox decided around 1970 to give all of their workers 'personal computers' to see what they could do with them. The researchers invented/integrated several new things, including Object Orientation, windowing systems, mice, networking. Needless to say this was 'influential'.

Cell phones; radio phones have been available for years, but only recently have the technologies been cheap enough that your average joe public can annoy you on the bus. Nevertherless, many rich people have appreciated this tech for quite a while; they've been in a time warp compared to the rest of us; wheeling and dealing whilst the rest of us looked on enviously.

Encryption; this has been available to the military and spies for quite a while, but the hardware was too expensive and cumbersome for ordinary use by the average man. Due to the microprocessor revolution it's now almost costless, and many web pages are routinely encrypted without the users even noticing.

Space travel; here they gave a bunch of propeller heads a few trillion and pointed them at a rock on the moon and went 'fetch'. The rest is history. But people are currently looking like they might be actually be getting Space Tourism in about 10 years. Dennis Tito timewarped for himself.

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