A time machine has allegedly been invented by one Iranian scientist named Ali Razeghi.
Razeghi says his laptop-sized device could accurately predict the next eight years of anyone’s life.
‘It will not take you into the future, it will bring the future to you,’ the 27-year-old from Tehran declared.
He said his so-called ‘Arayayek Time Travelling Machine’ could help forecast future confrontations with other countries or variations in the value of foreign currencies and oil prices.
Mr Razeghi, managing director of Iran’s Centre for Strategic Inventions, told the Fars news agency: ‘Naturally a government that can see five years into the future would be able to prepare itself for challenges that might destabilise it.
‘As such we expect to market this invention among states as well as individuals once we reach a mass production stage.’
And he hit back against criticisms from friends that he was ‘trying to play God’, insisting: ‘This project is not against our religious values at all.
‘The Americans are trying to make this invention by spending millions of dollars on it where I have already achieved it by a fraction of the cost.
‘The reason that we are not launching our prototype at this stage is that the Chinese will steal the idea and produce it in millions overnight.’
The gadget can supposedly use ‘complex algorithms’ to respond to a user’s touch by providing a print-out of between five and eight years of predictions.