I get that people just refer to them as time machines, but they’re actually space-time vehicles.
Before your first journey, you calibrate it to a reference point (mine already had Earth mapped out, with a gravity well depth monitor as a fail-safe) so that you lock your target coordinates in space and time.
But no, it’s not teleportation. You’re still just travelling to your destination, you just get there as quick as you want and without the need to be disintegrated.
Space and time are the same thing. Spacetime. Time travel would necessarily also by teleportation if you are traveling instantaneously through spacetime. Unless of course your travel is continuous like it is currently for all of us, just sped up, slowed down or reversed.
Also there is no objective point of reference for location in the universe, only relative points of reference. In other words, you are always some distance in some direction from some thing. But you never have objective stable coordinates relative to the universe itself. There is no “center” or other fixed point of the universe. So the earth is moving, yes, but only relative to other independent celestial bodies. And those bodies are moving, too, relative to other bodies. Their movement is always relative to a non-absolute frame of reference. No movement is objective to the universe, it’s all relative.
So it would be illogical to expect the earth to have moved X miles away in Y direction if you teleported one second into the past/future because that would presuppose that your location was objective and absolute in the universe at the point of time traveling and the earth moved relative to your absolute location. It would break known physics if that were the case, as much as time travel itself would.
🤔
If only there was some kind of theory that could explain relativity.
Especially in large celestial objects.
In a different position relative to what?
What point in space is the reference, where other things are placed relative to?
Any point you want, but likely the great attractor.
Tell me you didn’t pay attention in Spatial Distortion as Applied to Time Dilation class without telling me you didn’t pay attention in Spatial Distortion as Applied to Time Dilation class.
Space is full of time travelers that forgot to include the Zed access into their calculations.
Zed access sounds a lot cooler and more scifi than z axis.
Hahahahaha!!! Oh, man. Speech to text did not do me well earlier hahahahah
Alternatively teleportation doesn’t work unless you also have time travel
Teleportation or building your time machine into a spaceship so you can land.
Or stealing someone else’s spaceship time machine
Never go in against an Australian when death is on the line!
One of the best characters
Edit: autocorrect
That’s correct. But if you’ve figured out how to travel through time, traveling through space should be easy.
Also, be sure to wear a hazard suit so you don’t die from any ancient/future diseases your body has no protection from.
That’s why I always liked approaches that use a physical machine that has to stay in one place for an extended period of time. Quantum Break’s hard sci-fi approach to this was fascinating and kept making me reconsider how the time loop worked. Highly recommended for time loop nerds like me.
I’m convinced that if there’s a way to build a time machine, it’ll probably work like Primer.
Forget the orbit… remember the song…
https://genius.com/Monty-python-the-galaxy-song-lyrics
“Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving
at 900 miles an hour.
It’s orbiting at 19 miles a second,
so it’s reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me,
and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm,
at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.”A wormhole type time machine would leave the travel points A and B physically independent of each other. This opens up the option to change destinations… step in at New York, exit in San Francisco.
Due to the energies involved, creating a wormhole between two cities would probably leave you with a wormhole and no cities.
Those are just small issues that will be solved after few tries.
This is interesting because the most “realistic” (i.e. still not realistic) depictions of time travel in fiction involve travelling through a singularity or wormhole. So you probably have to be in space to start with, but also both ends of the wormhole have mass so they can be orbiting a planet or star and stay within a stable distance of it. It solves this particular problem (just leaving the other usual problem of causality!) It also proves your point since it does allow travelling in space, in fact it allows travelling faster than light.
I think the converse is true as well, that if faster than light travel is possible then time travel must be possible, at least if you take relativity at face value. As others have pointed out there’s no universal reference frame, and for any journey that is faster than light in one reference frame, there is another frame in which the journey goes backwards in time.
Maybe if you timed it juuuuuust right you could land somewhere on the planet as it orbits the sun and comes back to the same position once a decade or century or whatever? I mean I guess it depends on how you determine absolute location in the universe. Is that even possible with the universe constantly expanding?
Nope, not possible. The solar system itself is moving as is the galaxy… it’s useful to think of Earth’s orbit as spiraling around the sun in the direction our star is traveling. So 1 orbit later we have not come to the same location.
But moving relative to what?
Everything else.
Galactocentrism was established in 1925, which realised that our solar system is not near the center of the Milky Way. So, we are moving relative to the center of our galaxy.
In 1929, evidence was found that everything else is moving away from us. So we are moving relative to everything else.
In 1931, the Big Bang theory started superceding Galactocentrism, which was an acentrist model of the universe (where there is no center).
But what frame of reference?
Everything else. Or anything else, if you select a single quark (presuming we don’t split a quark).
If everything is moving away from us, then everything is moving away from everything else.
It’s just that some things are moving away from us faster than they are moving away from other things
Being sci-fi it can be explained with Q u a n t u m E n t a n g l e m e n t
All my childhood i was scared about being stuck in a building that was there back then. If i knew that was my smallest problem i would have scratched that idea long ago.
