{"id":3304,"date":"2005-05-05T21:31:51","date_gmt":"2005-05-06T04:31:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2005\/05\/05\/the-problem-with-time-travel\/"},"modified":"2019-12-13T14:40:34","modified_gmt":"2019-12-13T22:40:34","slug":"the-problem-with-time-travel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2005\/05\/05\/the-problem-with-time-travel\/","title":{"rendered":"The problem with time travel…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, the<\/em> problem. Because there is only one. ;)<\/p>\n

I don’t even remember how we got on the subject, but something in a conversation with Prairie last night got me rambling on about the biggest problem I have with time travel stories. As fun as they are, there’s always been one thing that bugged me about them — though, admittedly, it’s most likely because in the majority of instances, worrying about it would essentially negate the possibility of the story working at all.<\/p>\n

Essentially, it’s that while what makes the story fun is the ability to travel temporally, nobody ever seems to take into account the need to travel spatially as well.<\/p>\n

The Earth rotates at a little over 1000 miles per hour<\/a>. It also orbits the sun at around 67,000 miles per hour<\/a>. Our solar system is moving through the galaxy at approximately 447,387 miles per hour<\/a>. Our galaxy is moving at roughly 1.34 million miles an hour<\/a> through the universe. So, assuming that those are all the variables we have to work with (that is, assuming that time is a constant within our universe, and that there is nothing “outside” our universe to measure its relative speed), we travel (very) roughly 6,679,393,200 miles per second relative to our universe.<\/p>\n

So, were I to invent a time machine and move myself one second back in time, I’d end up popping back into the normal time stream somewhere more than six and a half billion<\/em> miles away from where I started! Needless to say, I’d be incalculably lucky to end up arriving anywhere that would allow me to survive — most likely, I’d just end up floating out in the vacuum of space somewhere.<\/p>\n

Any feasible time machine, then, would somehow have to ensure that the traveler was able to move temporally while remaining stationary spatially relative to their starting point<\/em>, and not to the universe as a whole.<\/p>\n

Tricky.<\/p>\n

Not that that keeps me from enjoying time travel stories anyway, of course. But there’s always this niggling little voice in the back of my head…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Any feasible time machine would somehow have to ensure that the traveler was able to move temporally while remaining stationary spatially _relative to their starting point_, and not to the universe as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2043],"tags":[13,514,1425],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}