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Nope, not visiting that (thelemmy.club)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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Context: He's in the files

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[–] 101 points 7 months ago* (15 children)

There's no universal frame of reference. Any theoretical time travel would likely need a beacon of some sort to calibrate their arrival point, meaning you couldn't travel back beyond the point time travel was established.

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  • [–] 32 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    You know what they say: the best time to build a time machine is 50 years ago.

    I think that's basically the movie Primer too, they'd turn the machine on, go hide in an apartment for X amount of time, then go back to the machine and emerge 5 minutes after they turned it on and just walked away.

    But gravity effects time, sticking close to a planet isn't going to be hard.

    Ironically enough the first (if we ever get them) time machines are going to be a hell of a lot like modern "UFOs" are described. You couldn't risk landing on the planet, elevation changes are what's really a nightmare to account for. Show up and hour early and everything is a foot higher because of how fast we're spinning.

    So you'd want a space craft, because space is big and empty. And realistically it's going to take something bigger than a telephone booth or even the 1980s embodiment of Florida on four wheels with a hood designed to do cocaine off of to house a time machine.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Show up and hour early and everything is a foot higher because of how fast we’re spinning.

    Any actual process for doing it would probably be continuous in some way. Even if it's just the machine making that part of the trip. Just leaving existence at some time and arriving at a different one doesn't make a lot of sense.

    So, just more reason to do it in space.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    Imagine your time machine has spiders at the time of your arrival, because it had a small defect that grew into an opening after several years.

    “Ha ha, I can’t see anything, but it seems like time travel tickles”

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  • [–] 17 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Damn physic laws removing the fun from physics

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Don't get me started on the second law of thermogoddamics (I'll never stop :).

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    That's not really true. First, if you can invent time travel you can probably do the math to calculate positions of objects. Second, even if you do need a beacon, you could use something that already exists. For example, radio waves. Earth has been shooting off radio waves for a fair amount of time now. That could be used as a beacon. Also, you could do something like having your time machine do small jumps, check it's relative position, then adjust. This would solve just about every issue.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

    So you have no idea how time travel would work but youre certain that traveling through time will be simple heliocentric math and radio waves can be used as a beacon?

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I know exactly how time travail would work; forward only. Backwards time travel isn't happening. In the imaginary world where it does work though I don't see how radio waves wouldn't work. I don't know what heliocentric math has to do with it. You can tell where they're coming from no matter where you are in the universe, not just around the sun. Then you adjust to that position and you're done.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    You can easily cross calculate between various, inertial frames of reference. The problem is that earth isn't sitting still in an inertial frame. We spin around the sun, and we orbit the center of our galaxy. We also get nudged about by the pull of other stars.

    Tracking a time jump (or technically a time-space jump) would be easy, if you just wanted to be within the solar system. With measurements the earth-moon gap would not be too hard. Hitting a surface exactly would be another story. Miss by a meter and your cut in half by a wall or floor.

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  • [–] -2 points 7 months ago*

    Just so many assumptions for a science that isnt real or known. Say time travel requires dimensional shift? Where do you land when you enter a new dimension and how do you navigate when you try to return?

    Shout out to time bandits.

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