A Problem with Time Travel

A few of us were sitting in a club last Saturday afternoon drinking some beer, when someone on the television mentioned time travel. We started talking about the subject and somebody mentioned something that I had never considered.

As everybody knows, the Earth orbits the Sun and the entire solar system moves through the galaxy. If you were to build a working time machine and go back one hundred years, you would find yourself floating in space, because the Earth hadn't got here yet. In order for time travel to work the way people think it would work, the time traveller would have to not only be able to travel through time, he would also have to have a way of travelling through space to where the Earth was at.

I'd never thought of that before!

At least Dr Who has the right idea then. Time and RELATIVE DIMENSION in space. Poor old HG Wells though would be floating in space.

Just something else to add to the list with killing your ancestors paradox.

The whole idea of time travel gives me a headache.

I think you could need a little more knowledge about this.
Try Youtube or others.
I am not sarcastic my friend i just find it dificult to explain things..

Like, simple put; if you move forward in time then you hve to expect time mooved for the whole universe. That means earth would be exactly were it is supposed to be.
Say you move from 2010 to 2025..when you get there it will be 2025 for earth also, and it would be "geographically" placed exactly were it is is suposed to..get it?

Sincere
Regards from sweden

Originally posted by gusan
I think you could need a little more knowledge about this.
Try Youtube or others.
I am not sarcastic my friend i just find it dificult to explain things..

Like, simple put; if you move forward in time then you hve to expect time mooved for the whole universe. That means earth would be exactly were it is supposed to be.
Say you move from 2010 to 2025..when you get there it will be 2025 for earth also, and it would be "geographically" placed exactly were it is is suposed to..get it?

Sincere
Regards from sweden

Problem is that you will still be where the Earth was at in 2010

Originally posted by gusan
I think you could need a little more knowledge about this.
Try Youtube or others.

I didn't know You Tube had solved the problem of Time Travel.

reply to post by JIMC5499


I remember listening to art bell a few years back and the guy on claimed to be a time traveling, not a shock for the show. But, i find it funny that he claimed you could only travel back in time but not forward. I.E 2010 to 1950 then back to that day in 2010. But not 2010 to 2011. Maybe this was because we know the excact location in the past but not the future? I wish i heard more but after 37 minutes of commercials i got home.

Like Einstein says. It's all relative.

You are correct about the whole time spacial relation thing.
And IMO it would be a big deal if you were traveling through space and wanted to calculate time travel in relation to a heavenly body you wanted to land on.

However I've always felt that once on that heavenly body. Time travel would be simple since you're already at your destination.

Much like in the same way when traveling on a jet plane doing several hundred miles per hour. when you throw a ball. it doesn't immediately fly off immediately the other way at the rate the plane is flying.

Things are relative.

I think by that the Gusan means, that by going back into the past you left at location A, you therefore when you pop back at the new time... you arrive at point A as it it existed in the time you arrived in. You arrive at the same location as it was, since after all your not moving in space... only in time. Kinda like when if you jump up around in a moving car you dont suddenly get slammed into the back window the moment your feet leave the floor.

Interesting idea all the same, and one I never thought about either The other thing that would be an issue if you think about it is if your time machine was static in its location and it moved in time fully... you'd have to avoid going back to a time during the machines construction otherwise you'd end up popping in right over the top of the machines earlier construction... which would be kinda nasty, heck might even cancel it all out in some sort of nasty time boom since id expect doing so would destroy the machines unfinished form, unless time fixes this by shunting you to a universe where the machine wasn't built so the space it occupies is empty.

Maybe thats why in movies you tend to see people being sent back only rather than the machine itself. That way you send them back into a predefined empty space that existed during construction, unless some sloppy technician left a chair right where your gonna appear during some phase of construction

Edit:- Dang threads move fast today

[edit on 24-2-2010 by BigfootNZ]

This is not a new " problem" you have discovered here.

John Titor the great time travel hoaxer even solved this problem way back when. I beleive his method was to use a computer to calculate ones destination in space using gravity readings.

... and what type of time machine are u thinking about ?? .... if its a portal you simply walk through, then it doesnt matter where/when it is..... and if earth is hurtling through space at thousands or millions of miles an hour, ...... why don't you fly off of it ??? Gravity Dear Watson !! perhaps the same force will keep a time traveler teathered to earth.

... and is earth really moving ?? or is the space around earth moving, expanding, taking earth along with it. in that case a time traveler would still end up in the same " space/time".


its good to keep an open mind, ..... however this " problem" isn't the biggest hurdle in time traveling....... Trust Me.

[edit on 24-2-2010 by IntastellaBurst]

If time travel is possible, and it is being used, they would have solved that problem.

What i mean is, it must be something to do with "Anti-Gravity Propulsion" and Wormholes in space. We would'nt know, but my guess is, what they use for time-travel, would of subsequently solved that by itself.

The wormhole would have traveled with space/time, therefore, if you went into one, you would come out of it where it was located at the time of arrival.

Originally posted by IntastellaBurst
... and is earth really moving ?? or is the space around earth moving, expanding, taking earth along with it. in that case a time traveler would still end up in the same " space/time".

Please "expand" on this

Problem solved:
If you can build a time machine you can probably build a teleporter, enter in the time you wish to go and coordinates (Invent some sort of 3d space coordinates (if they havent already been invented))

Originally posted by Incendia vox
Problem solved:
If you can build a time machine you can probably build a teleporter, enter in the time you wish to go and coordinates (Invent some sort of 3d space coordinates (if they havent already been invented))

Funny. In the book Battlefield Earth they had to enter the coordinates of where they were going into their teleporter. They had to do calculations to figure out the spatial shift of their destination.

No problem at all, because time travel is actually space travel as well, since space is time and time is space. Just select the appropriate space-time frame.

Anybody understand a little bit about relativity?

Your relative position to the edge of an expanding universe, and its point of origin would remain exactly the same regardless of what stage in its expansion (or contraction in the case of reverse travel) it was in. This would hold true right back to a few seconds after the Big Bang at which point the laws of physics as we understand them break down. We are not so much 'flying through space' as rushing outwards from a fixed point 14 billion years behind us. (I use years as a measurement of distance here as within this context space and time are to be considered one and the same). If we consider space and time to be the same thing the idea becomes more manageable.

Cool thread, really gets your mind turning about space. Mmmmm space....


I think of it like this: time = space

time travel = space travel

Perhaps when time traveling, You actually have to navigate through different dimensions to get to your location. So yes, you are traveling but not in the way we see it like going from Earth to the Moon. I'll have trouble explaining this but I'll give it a shot.

When you reach the "speeds" necessary to create efficiency time travel I.E going from today to tomorrow or vice versa that the craft or machine would create its own little universe within the energy field it is in. The way of travel completely negates "time" as we know it and allows it to move through "space" as its own little entity free of physical restriction. If you know the amount of time has passed or needs to pass in order to reach your destination is the amount you need to travel in "space". I think of time travel like an elevator. "Down" is going towards the past and "Up" is going towards the future.

I hope I didn't lose to many people there. But I think for time travel to be completely functional, the machine it is using would have to accommodate space travel as well. So if for some reason you wanted to be be at the 1980 Olympic games when USA whooped up on Russia and you ended up near Mars for some reason it wouldn't take you to long to make it for the start of the game.

If you can remember last year, literally re-imagine in your mind, and get to the point you meditate to remember the memory like you where there again, so vividly, then isn't that time travel?

What's to say it is not time travel except to believe it is not time travel?

If you claim general relativity, then this is easy: a memory is a stored light. You recall memory at the speed of light. It becomes instant. It's like the light comes "deep" from within and you focus consciously back to that memory. The more you focus the more you become conscious of where that memory happened in space-time, and then the memory becomes the anchor and time machine device to 'review' that past.

Now, I can go beyond this and even say your brain creates new realities, likes copies, of what you experience, yet I didn't want to digress away from the basic time machine device.

[edit on 24-2-2010 by dzonatas]

reply to post by dzonatas


Not so sure about that.

What has that got to do with relativity?

I think memories are just a facet of conciousness and a biological survival mechanism. (You remember your mistakes and so don't repeat them and new skills can be mastered, repeated and passed on to subsequent generations.)

There is no problem with Time Travel. I'm moving forward through time quite well, thanks. Backwards in time... well, that's another problem. I'm not sure if that's even possible.

Originally posted by IntastellaBurst
John Titor the great time travel hoaxer even solved this problem way back when. I beleive his method was to use a computer to calculate ones destination in space using gravity readings.
[edit on 24-2-2010 by IntastellaBurst]

It's... not quite that simple. For small jumps forwards or backward in time it may be feasible, but going back even just a few years can potentially throw you completely out of the solar system if your calculations are not absolutely perfect... and they won't be. The orbital and rotational periods of the planets are variant due to numerous factors. Slight alterations in the gravitational barycenter between the planets & the sun, lunar recession & tidal braking - affected by climate and continental configuration, Earth's accretion and secretion of matter & energy, as well as account for the subtle gravitational variants between the planets. Oh, and don't forget topography. You don't want to pop back into the future 300 feet below a mountain range or in the middle of the ocean.

As said, short jumps could probably be feasible as minute miscalculations wouldn't have time to throw you too far off where the Earth is going to be. Some fairly significant time frames may be achievable with sufficient enough small jumps and recalibration for variation at each waypoint. Unless your time travel devices had some way to "anchor" to a fixed position on or around the Earth itself - I don't think such a system would be sustainable.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's impossible to achieve, but it would be no simple task trying to predict where there Earth will be in space at any useful point in the future for synchronizing arrival at a point close enough to synchronize or be within rescue distance. Simply saying a "Computer Program will handle it" isn't enough, since you have to calibrate and progam that computer yourself. If your Time Machine operated like the one in H.G. Well's Novel and you cranked the dial several million years into future in relation to a fixed point on the surface, then brought it to a sudden halt - he would have sent that contraption cartwheeling across the landscape. How could he have known at the time about Tidal Braking, LIH, and Lunar Recession which wouldn't be substantiated until the Apollo program of the late 60's? What don't we know of the properties and interactions of the Local Group our Galaxy resides in... and which provide the closest thing we can apparently get to fixed relative points in space when coupled with the MBR. (Even then, we still appear to be the central fixed point no matter where or when we are due to the expansion of the universe.)

reply to post by dzonatas

If you claim general relativity, then this is easy: a memory is a stored light. You recall memory at the speed of light. It becomes instant. It's like the light comes "deep" from within and you focus consciously back to that memory. The more you focus the more you become conscious of where that memory happened in space-time, and then the memory becomes the anchor and time machine device to 'review' that past.

What? No... just the hell are you talking about? Memories traveling at the speed of light? Stored light? That's like correlating a program installed on your computer as being a result of the electricity stored in it. It's not, though electricity plays an important role. It's the arrangement of iron filings on the HDD platter to designate 1's & 0's and the pattern of open & closed circuits in the processor which create the program.