History Main / YearOutsideHourInside

* Emilie Agreste, in ''Fanfic/{{Spellbound}}'', disappeared into the LandOfFaerie on midsummer, but is expected to return safe and sound after a few weeks. ''Subjective'' weeks, that is, which may be decades or even centuries on Earth. As half-fae, Felix and Adrien have to surround themselves with protective magic on midsummer and other significant days, to avoid a similar fate.

* ''Anime/{{Gunbuster}}'' makes heavy use of this trope via relativistic TimeDilation PlayedForDrama.
** First, Noriko and Kazumi have to fly at 99.8% of lightspeed in order to catch up to a BigDumbObject, causing three months to pass for ''every minute''. For this reason, they only have ten minutes to accomplish their goal and decelerate back down using a shuttle Coach launched in later enough to catch up to the girls a minute later, with Coach explicitly mentioning [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urashima_Taro Urashima Taro]] by name as what will happen to them if they go over the time limit. [[spoiler:The object in question turns out to be the ship Noriko's father disappeared, having spent the years since cruising at this speed to the point where only two days have passed on board, causing Noriko to board the ship trying to look for him. Coach is forced to go in after her to drag her back out, causing the trio to miss the deceleration burn by 12 seconds, adding another two and a half months to the trip. By the time the trio set foot on the Exelion, they were only gone for barely an hour from their own perspective while ''nearly three years'' passed by in real time.]]
** By the end of the girls' first tour in space, [[spoiler:all of their high school classmates are a full decade older than them and have long since graduated, with Noriko's classmate Kimiko now having a three years old daughter]].
** In the last third of episode 5, [[spoiler:Noriko and Kazumi are forced to save the day again in a battle where a ''full day'' passes for ''every second'' - with the added caveat that the mission will take about six months in real time and Coach's IncurableCoughOfDeath might kill him before the girls' return, the knowledge of which causes Kazumi to suffer a mental breakdown during the battle]].
** By the final episode, [[spoiler:Noriko spent another six months in time dilation waiting for the final battle, adding ''another 15 years'' to her tally. When she receives a letter from Kimiko asking her to try to return to Earth while her daughter is still alive, Noriko breaks down crying from the realization of how much of a FishOutOfTemporalWater she has become]].
** In the end, [[spoiler:Noriko [[TearJerker ends up unable to fulfill the above request]] due to having to outrun the event horizon of a newly formed supermassive black hole subjecting her and Kazumi to such extreme time dilation that they only arrive back to Earth '''''12244 years later''''' and initially aren't even sure humanity exists anymore, [[BittersweetEnding although they swiftly and epically get proven wrong on that last part]]]].

* ''Fanfic/{{Myrmidons}}'': {{Exploited}}. Kanril Eleya leads her half of Joint Task Force Myrmidon in an attack on a vastly larger Fek'Ihri fleet, knowing a Starfleet task force in the area can't arrive soon enough to help. [[spoiler:So she leads them to a black hole and makes a low-altitude pass over the event horizon, [[TimeDilation slowing time for herself and the Fek long enough]] that TheCavalry is waiting when she reaches the far side.]]

* The film ''Film/FlightOfTheNavigator'' revolves around the light speed time dilation version of this.

* ''Literature/TheFourHorsemenUniverse'': In the ShortStory "Vvremya", the protagonists launch an [[{{Unobtainium}} F11]]-mining expedition to a planet orbiting a black hole. Some of the crew aren't told this is their destination and refuse to go down to the planet once they arrive, so a LineInTheSand deal is struck whereby they're allowed to stay behind on a shuttle stocked from the expedition supplies. Unfortunately nobody thinks to account for TimeDilation: while only a few weeks pass down on the planet, the shuttle is in a higher orbit and 97 years pass from their perspective, meaning that all aboard starved to death.

* In season six of ''Series/StargateSG1'', the Asgard used a TimeDilation device to [[SealedEvilInACan bottle up the Replicators]] long enough to develop a more permanent solution. It was supposed to operate like this, but the Replicators got to it before it activated and reversed it to YearInsideHourOutside. In "Unnatural Selection", the Asgard get SG-1 to go in and fix it.
** Earlier, in "A Matter of Time", the SGC gets a taste of this when they gate to a world being consumed by a black hole. The team on the planet appears nearly frozen in time, and the TimeDilation effects start to leak through the gate. The net result is that inside the base the episode takes about two days, while two weeks pass in the rest of the world. (And keep in mind that gates ''usually'' last ~37 minutes: the team on the black hole's side- if they somehow could make it through- would only experience, at most, 37 minutes, assuming they waited the entire time from their end. How much time would the rest of the world experience?)
* ''Series/StargateAtlantis'' had an episode where the team discovered a group of live Ancients who had suffered hyperdrive failure between Pegasus and the Milky Way, and decided to go the rest of the way by flying just under the speed of light, thus intentionally invoking relativistic time dilation.
** In another episode the team discovers a caldera where an Ancient device sped up time within several times. Col. Shepard was trapped in there for several months while the others spent hours trying to rescue him.

[[folder:Film — Live-Action]]

* ''Series/OnceUponATimeInWonderland'': It's implied at the beginning that Wonderland's time is faster than Alice's homeworld since she had been out of sight for a long time. This was more or less confirmed by "Who's Alice?", where [[spoiler:Alice returns to London after Cyrus's apparent death only to find she's been gone long enough to have a stepmother and a half-sister.]]

* Exaggerated with UsefulNotes/BlackHoles, because the gravity near them is so strong, time inside of a black hole passes infinitely slowly compared to anyone outside, meaning that if you were to go inside of a black hole and somehow come back out (what feels to you like) a few minutes later, you would find yourself an infinite amount of time in the future, after the universe has ended and everything has ceased to exist.

* In the final level of ''VideoGame/IllusionOfGaia'', the Tower of Babel, time progesses much faster that it does in the rest of the world due to special [[CometOfDoom doomsday comet]] radiation. In fact, the protagonists find [[spoiler:the ghosts of their former traveling companions]] waiting for them at the top of the tower, and they were all children when they parted ways.

* The Music/{{Queen}} song "39" is about a crew of astronauts who go to find a new, liveable world when Earth appears to be dying. They return triumphant, but due to travelling at near-lightspeed only a year has passed for them but a century has passed in earth years. The song ends with the line [[TearJerker "For my life still ahead, pity me"]]. This song is said to be "the most painless introduction to relativistic physics". ShownTheirWork - Brian May has Ph. D. in astronomy.

* In one episode of ''Series/TheTwilightZone'', an astronaut meets a woman just before he takes off on a long journey. During his trip, he's supposed to be in suspended animation, but the thought of returning to Earth as a young man and finding the woman he loved to be an old woman is something that he can't live with (never mind that she might have married or died or just didn't like him any more), so he turns off the suspended animation so he'll age the same as she did on Earth, but the real kicker is that the woman did love him, so she had herself suspended so that she would be young when he returned, causing a real downer ending.

* ''Literature/TheSnowQueen'': Gerda spends a few days in an enchanted garden (with a chaser of LotusEaterMachine added by an old sorceress) where it's always summer, but when she manages to come to her senses and escape, the world beyond its walls has gone from spring to autumn.

* In the poem ''LaBelleDameSansMerci'' (literally "The Beautifuil Lady Without Mercy") John Keais tells os a man meeting a beautiful Fairy who takes him home to her magic caverns, where he falls totally in love. Then one day he wakes on the barren hillside, deserted, and an assembly of ghosts and wraiths tell him that, like them, he has wasted his life away with the beautiful lady, and it has all vanished.

* In the poem ''LaBelleDameSansMerci'' (literally "The Beautifuil Lady Without Mercy" Samuel Coleridge tells os a man meeting a beautiful Fairy who takes him home to her magic caverns. where he falls totally in love. Then one day he wakes on the barren hillside, deserted, and an assembly of ghosts and wraiths tell him that, like them, he he has wasted his life away with the beautiful lady, and it has all vanished.

[[folder:Folklore]]
* In Irish folklore there is a story about Tir na nOg (Land of youth). The story is about Oisin, a chieftain's son who while out hunting with his friends, encounters and falls in love with a woman named Niamh from the aforementioned land. Oisin leaves his friend, saying that he will return shortly and follows the woman to Tir na nOg. Oisin spends 3 years there in bliss but eventually realizes he misses his friends and family and wishes to return home for a visit. Niamh, his now wife, does not want him to suffer alone so gives him a horse warning him not to let his foot touch Irish soil. Oisin agrees and travels to his home only to find his village in shambles and Ireland as a whole 300 years older. Upon realizing his friends and family are dead, Oisin despairs but notices a group of men attempting to move a large rock without much success. Oisin in his haze leans over to help. He manages to move the rock but loses his balance and falls off his horse. In front of the men Oisin turns to dust, aging the 300 years that he missed. He dies and rejoins his clan and friends in the afterlife.
* The tale of Urashima Taro: he spends a day in the underwater palace only to come back up finding out decades have passed in his absence and his mother passed away from age long ago.
[[/folder]]

* Forms a core plot during the final stretch of ''Anime/{{Tailenders}}''. The closer the main characters get to the Indian Terraformer, the more time starts to distort making it so that while minutes and seconds are passing for them, years or even centuries pass in the rest of the world. [[spoiler:This is why Loser King vanished and never managed to finish the race 100 years prior. He simply hadn't reached the goal and was still racing full throttle from his point of view]].
* ''Anime/{{Gunbuster}}'' makes heavy use of this trope via relativistic TimeDilation PlayedForDrama.
** First, Noriko and Kazumi have to fly at 99.8% of lightspeed in order to catch up to a BigDumbObject, causing three months to pass for ''every minute''. For this reason, they only have ten minutes to accomplish their goal and decelerate back down using a shuttle Coach launched in later enough to catch up to the girls a minute later, with Coach explicitly mentioning [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urashima_Taro Urashima Taro]] by name as what will happen to them if they go over the time limit. [[spoiler:The object in question turns out to be the ship Noriko's father disappeared, having spent the years since cruising at this speed to the point where only two days have passed on board, causing Noriko to board the ship trying to look for him. Coach is forced to go in after her to drag her back out, causing the trio to miss the deceleration burn by 12 seconds, adding another two and a half months to the trip. By the time the trio set foot on the Exelion, they were only gone for barely an hour from their own perspective while ''nearly three years'' passed by in real time.]]
** By the end of the girls' first tour in space, [[spoiler:all of their high school classmates are a full decade older than them and have long since graduated, with Noriko's classmate Kimiko now having a three years old daughter]].
** In the last third of episode 5, [[spoiler:Noriko and Kazumi are forced to save the day again in a battle where a ''full day'' passes for ''every second'' - with the added caveat that the mission will take about six months in real time and Coach's IncurableCoughOfDeath might kill him before the girls' return, the knowledge of which causes Kazumi to suffer a mental breakdown during the battle]].
** By the final episode, [[spoiler:Noriko spent another six months in time dilation waiting for the final battle, adding ''another 15 years'' to her tally. When she receives a letter from Kimiko asking her to try to return to Earth while her daughter is still alive, Noriko breaks down crying from the realization of how much of a FishOutOfTemporalWater she has become]].
** In the end, [[spoiler:Noriko [[TearJerker ends up unable to fulfill the above request]] due to having to outrun the event horizon of a newly formed supermassive black hole subjecting her and Kazumi to such extreme time dilation that they only arrive back to Earth '''''12244 years later''''' and initially aren't even sure humanity exists anymore, [[BittersweetEnding although they swiftly and epically get proven wrong on that last part]]]].
* ''Manga/SugarSugarRune'':In the manga, time moves faster in the human world then the witch world.

* Sugar Sugar Rune https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Manga/SugarSugarRune
In the manga time moves faster in the human world then the witch world.

See also: TVTropesWillRuinYourLife.

* ''Film/StarTrekGenerations'': [[spoiler:James T. Kirk]], who was presumed killed in the accident aboard the ''Enterprise''-B was actually alive for 78 years inside [[NegativeSpaceWedgie the Nexus]], where time and space don't mean anything. When [[spoiler:Captain Picard]] meets him inside, [[spoiler:Jim Kirk]] tells him that he hadn't been here for more than ''a couple of minutes''.

** Earlier, in "A Matter of Time", the SGC gets a taste of this when they gate to a world being consumed by a black hole. The team on the planet appears nearly frozen in time, and the TimeDilation effects start to leak through the gate. The net result is that inside the base the episode takes about two days, while two weeks pass in the rest of the world.

* Exaggerated with ''UsefulNotes/BlackHoles'', because the gravity near them is so strong, time inside of a black hole passes infinitely slowly compared to anyone outside, meaning that if you were to go inside of a black hole and somehow come back out a few minutes later, you would find yourself an infinite amount of time in the future, after the universe has ended and everything has ceased to exist.

* Because the gravity of black holes is so strong, time inside of a black hole passes infinitely slowly compared to anyone outside, meaning that if you were to go inside of a black hole and somehow come back out a few minutes later, you would find yourself an infinite amount of time in the future, after the universe has ended and everything has ceased to exist.

* Exaggerated with black holes, because their gravity is so strong, time inside of a black hole passes infinitely slowly compared to anyone outside, meaning that if you were to go inside of a black hole and somehow come back out a few minutes later, you would find yourself an infinite amount of time in the future, after the universe has ended and everything has ceased to exist.

* In the ''Literature/{{Bounders}}'' series, time in the spacetime rift passes roughly 2,700 times faster. [[spoiler:The lost aeronauts from Bounding Base 51 who were presumed dead for 15 years weren't actually killed, but were trapped in the rift for what felt to them like two days. Jasper and Mira become trapped there as well when they unsuccessfully attempt to bound away from Alkalinia. The Youli rescue them and the other aeronauts after a few hours, by which point a year has passed for everyone else.]]