More Time Travel, less serious

Not to be a wet blanket, but there's a fundamental flaw in any time machine story that I've never seen anyone even mention, much less overcome.The Earth is moving. If you move in time, the Earth will have spun beneath you, and changed to a different place in its orbit about the sun. In addition, the rotation of the galaxy will have moved the entire solar system. If you move in time, you'll end up in empty space. If you some how manage to overcome those things and transport yourself in space as well as in time and manage to perfectly synchronize those movements so that you're in the same place as you were when you began your trip through time, you'll also have to account for the fact that that place will be moving in a different direction and at a different velocity than it was when you left. Thus, you also have to synchronize the direction and velocity of your movement to coincide with your movement through time and space.This time travel stuff is a lot trickier than most people even consider.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

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We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

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It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

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...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

First a disclaimer. I know nothing about physics other than what I can remember from high school. So I'm sure much of what I'm about to say is not even wrong. But as I understand it, yeah, I'd guess that since time and space are the same, in essence we're all time travelers and space travelers. But while we move in space differently, we all move through time at the same rate, 24 hours per day. It seems to me that time travel is about separating the two, moving through time at a different rate than everyone else, and in a different direction as well.Now, having given the matter some small amount of thought, I suppose one could postulate some sort of space/timey explanation for why time travelers typically find themselves in the same spatial coordinates relative to the Earth when they move in time. Perhaps the deep gravity well the Earth creates bends space/time in such a way that objects moving in time tend to stay where they are, kinda like a Newton's Fourth Law.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

​

We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

​

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

​

...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

I like the Niven stories. To each his own I guess.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

​

We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

​

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

​

...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist