Imagine if you could halt the constant march of time. ...if you could slow it down...

and speed it up. Imagine if you could stop time... or even reverse it. The world about us would look quite different. Imagine no longer... come with us as we go on a journey through time. Our lives are ruled by the clock. But our obsession with time should come as no surprise. Deep inside us we all have a clock that regulates our lives. Can this body clock tell us when we're most likely to get drunk? If we all wanted to live forever could this worm hold the key to eternal life? In our busy lives we are always chasing time always trying to save it. But in a crisis how can we change time to help save ourselves? We think of ourselves as slaves to the clock. Racing through life at breakneck s peed, has become the norm. But could our pursuit of speed be the key to time travel, letting us visit the d istant future? Will we ever truly become masters of time? Time is precious. We never seem to have enough. We've spent centuries building c locks, all to more and more accurately measure the passing of hours, minutes and seconds. Yet it still doesn't buy us any more of the stuff. Time has come to mean the straitjacketing of our day - th e constant schedule that rules our lives. Yet, if you think about it, our everyday experience of time is far from constant . We all have long, lazy days when time seems to stand still. But time doesn't change, only our sense of it. This sensation might all be down to how we process what we see. We can see the effect at the movies. A film seems to pass by in a seamless flow. But what we are really seeing is a series of static photographs, one following quickly after another. When slowed down it's clear that each one is slightly different from the one before. Flash twenty-four of them past each second, and t hey create a sense of fluid movement. Your brain works in a similar way. When you leave the cinema you're also seeing the world as a series of pictures. Your brain does a rapid scan of each new image to register what's changed. It's how we avoid bumping into things. But, like a film, we just see the joined-up effect. If we could reduce the numbe r of images we see each second, just imagine how our sense of time would change too. Our lives would appear to flash past like an express train. The seasons would wh iz past in minutes rather than months. Lf, on the other hand, our brains scanned a huge number of separate images every second, we'd be swamped with detail. It would be like living in perpetual slow motion. And let's face it, that's just too chilled out. But not for a fly. A fly needs e xactly this heightened level of awareness because it hurtles through the world at such high speed. Flies see things we don't; the flickering of a strip-light and the individual sc ans on a TV-screen. Most importantly it can see the need for a quick escape, from the fly swat, for instance. We don't need to see the world like the fly. Day to day that level of detail is unnecessary. The rate at which we clock our s urroundings is the one that best fits our pace of life. It can vary. When we're waiting, time seems to drag. When we're busy, time flies. But we can override all of this. We have a remarkab le, hidden power over time. It kicks in during a crisis.

Faced with extreme danger the mind enters an altered state. People report seeing in black and white - why bother to waste time processing colour when your brain is on overload? But most importantly, people say time slows down. The brain is now on high alert , processing far more each second than normal. It buys you extra time - to think... and act. So we can, when necessary, and wit hout a second thought, fundamentally control our experience of time. Why, then, do we feel we're such slaves to the clock? Ti me is organized to a level that borders on obsession. We can now measure it to the nearest billionth of a second. How did this obsessi on start? Well we've come by it quite naturally. Even though the Egyptians were the first to formally divide daylight into hours, we were well equipped to tell the time way before this. Our earliest ancestors u sed the changing seasons to measure out the years. The phases of the moon marked out the months. But it was the daily arc of the su n that counted most. Nature follows this rhythm. So no surprise that the sun's movement across the sk y affects us too. Although we used the shadows it cast to mark time, the sun's influence goes much deeper than this. It helps our bodies keep time by regulating a clock that we don't even see. One that's ticking away deep inside u s. It's a biological clock a master clock that's set by the sun and which controls all aspects of our lives - when you are most alert, when you sleep, and even whe n you are most likely to visit the toilet. The exact location of this clock? Right in the middle of your brain in an area c alled the hypothalamus. But, like man-made timepieces, this biological clock loses time. It has to be re set twice a day by the sun. It's all done through a hotline of nerves that link this master clock, via the e ye, to the outside world and so to the sun's cycle. Mostly we're oblivious to how our bodies keep time. And yet we're riddled with different clocks. Even our liver has one. The liver does most of our detoxi ng, so knowing how it ticks is crucial if you need to stay sober, or if you really want to get legless. So what's the low-down? The liver is on go -slow and least able to break down alcohol around lunchtime - so drinking then w ill get you merrier, quicker. But a few too many does more than make you feel woozy. It can have some very strange effects on your other cycles. Your body temperature follows a very strong rhythm, which is also controlled by a biological clock. But this is knocked off track after a session at the pub. Using a thermal camera to monitor the body's tempera ture scientists can track how the normal rhythm is upset. The changing colours show the temperature see-sawing through the night. It's the disruption to this, and other body clocks, that's thought to affect the size of your hangover. But science isn't revealing all bad news. Just as the re's the best time to drink alcohol, there is also a prime time to take the cure. The latest research shows any medicine will most likely work b est if taken at a particular time of day. It's already known that painkillers do the job best when taken in the morning. So now you can deal with that hangover a bit quicker too. There seems to be no escape from the pressure of time. Our bo dies are full of clocks regulating everything we do. But what we really want is more time and the only way to achieve that is to stre

tch the lifetime we've got. When our biological clock stops ticking, so do we. Is there anything we can do to keep it going? Scientist s have always been searching for life's holy grail - immortality. But now nature is giving them some clues. For most living things, freezing is de adly. But insects, such as this weta, some amphibians, and even a species of reptile, survive months of extreme cold by doing just this. They put time on hold. Ice-crystals usually destroy living cells. But not in the se animals. When warm weather brings a thaw, they're back in business. How they do this migh t prove useful one day, but some people can't wait. They've been frozen, in the belief that solutions to ageing and disease will be found. The catch is: You have to be dead first. After dying these optimists are suspended head first in liquid nitrogen And there they remain, frozen in time, banking on a future when death can be reversed. Back in the real world, even our attempts to live longer are backfiring on us. The very air we need to breathe, is also ki lling us. and each time something in the air makes us age. It's oxygen. Our cells need oxygen to make energy, but leftover oxygen slips away and starts a kind of rusting from within. Oxygen isn't the only rogue element. Sunlight, pollution and tobacco smoke also form these so-called free radicals. And it's these radicals that do the damage. The good news is there's something that can stop the rot. Even though it proves your mum right. You have to eat you r greens. Vegetables in particular contain antioxidants, which help soak up those free radicals. So broccoli and be ans help keep those wrinkles at bay. If you had thought that was the bad news, well, there's worse. The human body has a design flaw. Al l the billions of cells that make up our bodies contain the genetic instruction manual that makes us who we are DNA. Our cells need constant renewal and they do this by dividing. Each time the DNA instructions get copied and passed on. Sadly the system's got a glitch and, surprisingly quickly, mistakes start creepi ng in. As the cells divide, a bit of DNA information might get lost. So the new cell isn't an exact copy. It 's a bit like a game of Chinese whispers. It's why our bodies end up looking very different fr om how they started. Ageing seems to be a fact of life, so how on earth can we stay forever young? For starters you could try hiding you r age. But even if all the surgery, creams, supplements and Botox in the world make you look younger, they won't help you live forever. Still, we are pushing our lifetime as far as we can. Just a century ago life expectancy in the West But thanks to better diets and medical back up, a child born now can expect to l ive Today in the UK there are more centenarians than ever before. But what's our limit? Well we believe the oldest human So can we buy ourselves m ore time? Some scientists think we can. They've increased the life of one animal Admittedly it's only a worm. But it has genes that control ageing. By fiddling w ith these genes scientists have turned the worm, on the right, into a very ancient specimen indeed. Maybe, with a similar genetic nip and tuck, we could one day cheat time and live much, much longer. But for now, perhaps the best way

to buy more time is not with science, but by having fun. You can grow even older by staying young at heart. A happy, optimistic person could dramatically extend their life by over twenty years. So, keep on smiling. Oh, and remember t o eat those greens! Although our time eventually runs out, we're finding ways of pushing life spans to the limit. Look after your body and it will look after you. Our brains can change how we experience time and avoid disaster. And with a little help from the sun, our bod y clocks keep ticking over nicely. So without even realising, our bodies already master time. But we're not content with this. We expect more and more from the time we've got. Which means everything else has to speed up. How has this race against time changed the world around us? One of the biggest repercussions from doing things more quickly may have been tr iggered This was when man first set foot in Australia. The first people brought something that helped them to survive here, but it was something that may have changed the landscape forever. Fire. With fire they may have set off a chai n of events that they knew nothing about. It's just one example of how we humans cannot see the results of what we do. Not because the events aren't dramatic, bu t because they happen on a timescale way, way beyond our own. To see what happened in Australia, we first have to appreciate how fire transformed these people's lives. Fire is destructive, so why torch the very land they lived on? It was all done t o save time. With fire they could clear the land faster than ever before. And despite appearances the devastation was sh ort lived. The bare ground was quickly filled with fresh new growth. These tender shoots attracted grazing animals. It made hunting quicker and easier. Saving time is al l part of the human drive to survive. But now there's a suggestion that these small-scale fires did more than just scorch a few plants. Only now, with the benefit of hindsight, can we see how the dramatic changes, he re in Australia, might have begun. Fire was such a great time-saver that the early people relied on it more and more. As the blazes became more frequent, the plants had l ess and less time to grow back. Thousands of fires over thousands of generations may have changed the relationship between the plants and the climate. Eventually some of Australia's annual monsoons just dried up. The skies cleared and the rivers ran dry. Gone was the w ater from in front of their eyes. But because it disappeared little by little, drop-by-drop over thousands of years, they neve r saw it happening. Some believed this continental-scale change in the weather dried up Australia's largest lake. When the first people arrived, Lake Eyre covered a vas t area in the middle of the country. Its disappearance coincided with man's arrival. Tiny bits of timesaving the use of fire to clear the land and speed up the hunt for food added up, over time, to this. Australia turned into the largely desert continent we know today. And a once massive lake is gone. Fire is one of the first time saving devices but it certainly wasn't the last. We humans will do anything to cut corners. But, even as we settled into the fast lane, we discovered something that took us up a whole new gear. The sun once ruled our day. Here we're turning the sun's heat into round the clock energy electricity. And with it we are changing

our whole perspective on time. Since we discovered electricity, time itself has been given the shock treatment. Life today would be impossible without electricity. Everything happens with the flick of a switch. Electricity has pushed everything into over-drive. It's the power behind the world's fastest growing ci ty Las Vegas. One minute there's an empty plot of land, then a timber frame, turn the corner a nd the walls go up. Next street, the tiles go on. Opposite the houses are finished. And round the co rner people have already moved in ready to live the dream. There can be a thousand new peopl e a week, riding in on this power surge. It's taken just decades to turn a vast area of desert into downtown. But it's no t just Vegas. It's everywhere. Electricity hasn't just transformed the world. It's turned night into day. In Ve gas buildings go up, even in the dark. When the sun goes down, the city lights up. The effect is like a whoop of victor y over our age-old slavery to daylight. Now there's no need to wait for anything. The slot machines, one-arm bandits, Dinnertime is anytime. Here you won't run out of time only money. This round-the -clock existence is not just changing our habits. Many of the animals that share our cities have always been nocturnal. some of them behave in strange ways. Birds come into our cities for warmth from the lights, especially at Christmas. But the light has also meant that some bird s are singing their dawn chorus in the middle of the night. The trees are confused too. Longer nights in autumn signal the shedding of leaves. But trees growing by street lamps are now keeping their leaves longer than those in the dark. We can only wonder what this is doing to our own body clocks. Electricity has encouraged us to expect more and more fr om our day. We're burning the candle at both ends. Electricity hasn't just accelerated changes to the landscape. It's given us control over the night as well as the day. It's changed our whole attitude to time. Today our need for speed means we want everything now. And with so many of us all chasing the clock, we must get our food from plant to plate as quickly as possible. How have we done that? Take rice - Across Asia it's the staple diet for two billion people. It feeds over half the world's population. In Indonesia the landscape is dominated by it. Huge tracts of the jungle have been replaced by rice fields and terraces. Devoting large areas of land to one single crop is the only way to feed so many people, quickly and easily. But this is just the start of high-speed farming. Rice growing still needs a large work force. And despite many hands making light work - it still takes a lot of time to grow and harvest. So what can be done to speed things up and save time? Where possible machines take over. This is how we get our daily bread. Huge combine harvesters clear wheat-fields quickly and efficiently. But there's another, bigger problem. Natur e controls the speed at which food plants grow and ripen. And of course that dictates when they hit the shops. only available in the summer. Now they're in our shopping trollies year-round. There are plum tomatoes, vine-ripened tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, vittoria, pomodorino. We have an insatia ble appetite for them: The British alone consume What happened to the humble tomato? The tomato plant f

ell under our complete control. And what helped us do this was the glasshouse. With glasshouses, tomato growth went high-tech. In a short space of time the greenhouse has gone from rustic garden potting place to megalithic tomato factory. of the English countryside. But it's about as far from nature as you can get. Is this is a window on the future? It's a precisioncontrolled world within a world, where growing time is compressed and tomatoes hurtle throu gh their cycle at unnatural speed. They're grown in a special mineral base and drip -fed the water and food they need. As the temperature gets too hot the windows open automatically and once the best growing temperature is reached, they close. This is performance growth Seasons are a thing of the p ast. There's even a boiler, which kicks in to stop the tomatoes catching a chill. Nothing is left to chance. They ripen double-quic k and then they're picked. Even this happens round the clock. And although it's done by hand, it's made as easy as possible so no time is wast ed. Demand is rocketing. It might not be long before we're eating more tomatoes than any other fruit. No wonder we're doing al l we can to grow them as fast as possible. To speed up nature we have created artificial worlds. Is it only a matter of time before all we grow comes under our control? The tomato's rise, from market garden fruit to techno-plant, is just one of the many ways in which we've taken time and shrunk it. If you drive down time, you drive down cost. Tim e is now money. So, where on earth do we go from here? Iron-ore, coal, copper and aluminium are the raw ingredients of our material world. To get enough of them, you have to shift shed-Ioads of ea rth. This iron-ore mine in Australia is one of the most enormous holes in the ground we've ever created. But where are the miners? Who's doing all the work? Men have been replaced by monster machines. of hundreds of men in a fraction of the time. The ultimate labour-saving device. Backbreaking work that used to take one man one month, now takes one minute. We have the power to move mountains. An d what's more, we can do it with breath-taking speed. might, But what's behind the rush? This iron ore is the essential ingredient in our drive to beat time. It goes to make steel and beyond that, all the tools that save us precious minutes. But one product above all, has changed our experience of time. This train is car rying enough ore The most revolutionary time saving machine ever invented. The car, perhaps more than anything else, has accelerated the way we live. It's possibly our first ever time machine. It gives us the freedom to travel fur ther, faster than ever before. The first ones didn't exactly take your breath away. Though at the time people thought you'd suffocate if you went much faster. But that didn't hold us back! Top speeds have gone from barely more than walking pace to in less than a centur y. A century ago most people never left their own village. Today we can get to anywhere Because we can get about so fast, we're always on the move. Speed is how we beat time. And speed may be the key to our ultimate dream. Time travel. Imagine being able to turn back the clock, a nd relive your life. Imagine turning your car into a time machine and taking a journey through time. Well today we are much closer

to turning this dream into a reality. And that's because we now know there's no such thing as the constant march of time. suggested the mind-bending theory that time varies with speed. He proved that th e length of one second depends on how fast you're moving. The faster you travel the slower that second would take. So what would this mean in practice? Take these twins. O ne travels into space at phenomenal speed, leaving his brother behind on earth. Neither will notice a change in time but when they meet again they'll see a big difference. When our space traveller completes what was - for him he finds his brother on earth The younger twin has time travelled into his broth er's future. So how fast would he have been going? Something close to the speed of light. That's around But is this actually possib le? The speed of light is still a long way off, but new breakthroughs could find us hurtling towards it faster than we ever imagined. However far-fetc hed time travel may seem, don't brush it off as a dream. Lots of things once seemed impossible. A little over a hundred years ago, the id ea of talking to someone on the other side of the world, would have been laughed at. Today a telephone ca ll to New Zealand where words move at the speed of light is taken for granted. So time travel might happen sooner than you think. But what a bout the time travel we see in science fiction? Going back, as well as forward, in time? Scientists h ave discovered tunnels that connect two areas of space, which might just do this. These tunnels, called wormholes, are a short cut between two points in time. At the moment it's still a theory but, given time... So, if you could become a Time Lord, what power would you have? Just imagine the options. You could head into the future to visit your great grandchildren, perhaps even see their children's children. What kind of world would they be living in? You might prefer to take a trip into the past. Visit the world of the ancient Egyptians and see how they built the pyramids. Would you tell the early fire-makers of Australia the consequences of their actions? Maybe you'd go see the spectacles of the world, witness the creation of the Grand Canyon. You could even walk with dinosaurs... Would you go back into the unknown, to witness the creation of the Universe and the very beginning of Time? If you could become a true master of ti me where would you go? What would you dare to change?