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Time and space are the same thing, if you’re traveling in time it seems like you could travel in space at the same time.
Yeah but traveling in space takes time, so you can reason that traveling in time takes space.
Right so have we tried putting the Time Machine in the middle of a football field or smthn?
Yes and that’s how we ended up with American Football. In the original timeline, it never existed.
The goal posts and yard lines were all just decorative. People would come from miles away to sit and watch the field for 2 or 3 hours. Girls would do flips and shake pom-poms to encourage the grass to grow. Luckily the time traveler brought their egg ball with them and figured out something to do in these fields.
Which is why the deLorean was an amazing time machine, obviously.
I think that’s the joke. Media presents time travel as just inputting the date and off you go, but really you need to input time AND space because the two are interconnected.
Of course we could just imagine that all time machines somehow calculate the space itself just by knowing the current spacetime and the inputted time, but now we’re giving writers too much benefit of doubt. In most cases time travel is used as plot device and very little thought is given to how it could work.
And an interesting sidenote. This also means that teleportation is a special case of time travel and if you’ve solved time travel you’ve probably also solved teleportation.
I teleport two Klingons every morning and I’m still late to the staff meeting.
What is time, if not curvy space?
Since relativity tells us there is no universal reference frame, then it having its reference tied to earth is perfectly valid.
Also sidenote: my favourite idea about time travel is that time travel is entirely possible, but will never be invented, because the timeline where its not invented is the only stable timeline. Because any timeline where it IS invented gets changed as soon as you use it, meaning the timeline changes over and over again every time time travel is invented repeatedly either infinitely or until someone accidentally creates a timeline where its never invented, only then does the timeline stop changing and we can actually experience it. So because we exist and can experience time, we can deduce that we will never invent time travel.
Yeah I think we don’t have to worry about it for the same reason why you don’t have to worry about getting thrown backwards when jumping in a moving train.
Sure, but it’s a lot of fun to think about :D
You might have better luck and accuracy using our galaxy’ s black hole for reference marker depending on how much time you intend to traverse
How much do you know about the “double slit” experiment and its subsequent variations? Because I think that’s a rabbithole you’ll enjoy. That first video is really just context; this next link is another video in that series, and this is the one that really pertains to the consequences of time travel: https://piped.video/watch?v=8ORLN_KwAgs
In most media time machines are also teleporters - many are explicitly so, with the destination space needing to be chosen at the same time as the destination time, but even when that’s not shown they still make the time traveller suddenly vanish and then just suddenly reappear elsewhen.
One movie I’ve seen with a more “realistic” time machine is Primer. It’s not at all a teleporter or portal. Very slight spoiler:
It sidesteps the whole issue that OP presents because the place where you exit the machine after traveling is just where the machine is when it’s turned on to begin with. You can’t time travel outside the machine, including to before it exists, and your path (in all four dimensions) is contiguous.
Primer is one of my favourite movies ever. It was made on a budget of 3 peanuts and pocket lint, and it shows, but damn it’s an interesting premise.
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Same with The End of Eternity - they can travel to different times at which the machine existed.
In fact, isn’t it a bit similar with the only ‘real’ possibility of time travel - you create a wormhole and take one end on a relativistic journey to create a time difference between the ends, but the only possible travel is between the two ends that you have created.
Guess this is why the TARDIS had to be a space ship as well.
The name TARDIS is literally the solution, “Time And Relative Dimension In Space”.
Time machines have been invented dozens of times since the 1800s; there’s s trail of them drifting through deep space.
I feel like the scientists smart enough to invent time machines would have thought of that
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What’s a VHS tape?
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Well, since this was posted in Science Memes, I’ll be so pedantic that science does not support the idea of travelling back in time.
It does support travelling forwards in time, at various speeds, but you’ll constantly be aware of where you are (even if one method involves travelling really fast and therefore may still leave you in empty space).
I’m traveling forward in time right now.
Big, if true
if you believe in the notion that the universe is cyclic then you can mimic time traveling backwards by traveling forwards, past the end of the universe, and stopping at just the right time in the new universe.
e.g., to get to 1700 you’d go (present time) -> (death of the universe) -> (1700 in next universe)
But what if the absence of the atoms of your body affects how the universe collapses and in turn expands?
If you’ve already done six impossible things today, why not stop for breakfast at Milliways?
then you’re in for a fun surprise
If the universe is cyclic, then the version of you from the previous one is also jumping to a time before when you left. It works if the board gets reset to the exact same position and true randomness doesn’t exist. We’re talking down to the electron scatter of radioactive decay.
If the universe is cyclic, then that would define it as a closed loop without any energy being removed or added. The very first instance of yourself traveling through time would break the loop by removing themselves from their iteration of the universe and reinsert into a future iteration. During those two points, the universe would now function with a deficit. This deficit could affect how it cycles to subsequent iterations.
What if that discrepancy in energy affects when the universe starts to contract or it’s speed to the big crunch/bang and subsequently the time to, and speed of expansion. Maybe it could even prevent the big crunch from reaching critical mass, where it would normally trigger a big bang, and stop the cycle altogether.
I mean, personally, I actually don’t believe that the Big Bang created everything out of
thin airvacuum, because much like travelling backwards in time, that would break causality.It makes much more sense for everything to just have always existed and the Big Bang is merely a very visible event + expansion afterwards.
I’m open to the notion that expansion and contraction happen in some sort of cycle, because well, many things do.But for it to be cyclical to the point where it repeats precisely the same? Why?
Can’t we just let the universe flobber on its merry way without assigning some higher meaning to everything it does?Futurama has an episode like that. It was a pretty good one.
I like the idea that time machines are like phones in that you need a receiver to pick up the signal. A consequence is that you can only travel back to the time that the machine was turned on.
You may enjoy Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, the short story.
The whole book is great if you like thought-provoking sci-fi premises I guess: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41160292
Time machines don’t exist and (as far as we know) cannot exist. Therefore, we can say they work however we want. If you can travel back in time, surely you can do that while remaining close to an arbitrary point of reference.
Hence how the artist was able to choose that the time machine in this context rewinds time while conserving the universal position(?)… Relative to the center of the universe(??)… assuming eucledian space(???)
How, uh, far back in time did you want to go?
I honestly think this would not happen because you would be time-travelling in the Earth’s frame of reference
Yeah, or if the time machine is genuinely a teleporter, then the invetor should at least know how to correct for drift.
There is no space reference in time traveling only a time reference, the time traveler don’t change his start point, but the Earth and the whole solarsystem do. If you travel 6 month to the future, you are still in the point where you started, but the Earth will be on the other site of the Sun. A time machine must be a spaceship, otherwise you won’t survive. That is the error of almost all movies about time travel since H.G.Wells.
If you travel 6 month to the future, you are still in the point where you started, but the Earth will be on the other site of the Sun.
Why would you remain spatially locked to the sun? The solar system is moving around the milky way. The Milky way is traveling at around 370 miles per second if we use the universe as a frame of reference. A point is both a place and a moment. Everything is moving relative to everything else. Time travel is also space travel.
Kinda depends, doesn’t it? A travel that let’s you see glimpses of reality/earth implies you’re making smaller skips that may keep you somewhat held in place. Being able to establish a vector through time may also imply control of vectors in space.
Also, six months would likely take us farther than the other side of the sun. If we’re completely de-referenced we might be able to find a universal reference frame or some wild shit.
Being human sucks.
This is a huge assumption. Why is it necessary that time would not have a space reference? I’d actually say that based on relativistic physics there probably is a space reference because the dimensions are linked. I think it’s possible that the momentum of the current movement could remain constant and thus stick the time traveling device to the earth. Coming to a complete referential stop in space would require beyond immense energy and be inefficient if one only wants to travel in time
Perhaps designated Time Travel zones that are kept clear year round and only allow jumps of exactly one year?
Yes, but it will not work, because the whole Solar system is traveling with the rotation of our Galaxy with the speed of 251 km/s, or 7,9*10^9 km/year
Ooh, but what if the time machine came from Mars and uses that as its frame of reference?
Someone should build a space machine so we can travel through space freely
We are all space machines on this blessed day
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So either we would have to invent teleportation along with time travel/ have some sort of "magnet pad’ that must exist and not break at all times on earth, or its the time machine type where it just fast forwards everything around you until somehow you’re in a mall
Since space and time are intertwined, we must travel both to achieve the desired goal
Maybe this is why Stephen Hawkings time travellor party never worked out lol
Ahummm, well actually, * adjusts monocle * time travel is not possible and since nobody has invented time machines yet, neither of these scenarios would happen in reality.
did you travel millions of years into the past?
