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So I just watched Time Cop on Cable Television, and for some reason this utterly pointless question popped into my head.
Lets say hypothetically you had a time traveling device. Now if you used it, and traveled back in time say 6 months. Wouldn't that mean that you would would be floating in space, on the opposite side of the orbit of Earth. In which case you would die a horrible death. Because you yourself would be Traveling back in time, along with the Earth. The Earths orbit would backtrack, and you yourself would not. You would still be at the same "location" that you were when you first traveled back.
I mean this can be applied to pretty much every single time travel based movie. Even if you Traveled back an exact year. The Earth still wouldn't be in the same location. It would be off by a "few" kilometers at best. Time travel could only really be possible if you did it in open space.
Do I actually have a pointless point here?
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Assuming time travel would ever work to begin with? :>
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United States22883 Posts
I guess it depends on the physics of the delivery. It's not like you land further back when you jump.
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I figure that teleportation is an easier technology to master than time travel, so I would say it's a given that all time machines are equipped with teleporters that circumvent the problem.
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I just read up on Time Travel on Wikipedia. It appears this has been brought up in specific things already.
Time travel, or space-time travel?
An objection that is sometimes raised against the concept of time machines in science fiction is that they ignore the motion of the Earth between the date the time machine departs and the date it returns. The idea that a traveler can go into a machine that sends him or her to 1865 and step out into the exact same spot on Earth might be said to ignore the issue that Earth is moving through space around the Sun, which is moving in the galaxy, and so on, so that advocates of this argument imagine that "realistically" the time machine should actually reappear in space far away from the Earth's position at that date. However, according to the theory of relativity, this argument is based on a false premise. Relativity rejects the idea of absolute time and space; there can be no universal truth about the spatial distance between events which occurred at different times[46] (such as an event on Earth today and an event on Earth in 1865), and thus no objective truth about which point in space at one time is at the "same position" that the Earth was at another time. In the theory of special relativity, which deals with situations where gravity is negligible, the laws of physics work the same way in every inertial frame of reference and therefore no frame's perspective is physically better than any other frame's, and different frames disagree about whether two events at different times happened at the "same position" or "different positions". In the theory of general relativity, which incorporates the effects of gravity, all coordinate systems are on equal footing because of a feature known as "diffeomorphism invariance"[47] (also called general covariance).
Nevertheless, the idea that the Earth moves away from the time traveler when he takes a trip through time has been used in a few science fiction stories, such as the 2000 AD comic Strontium Dog, in which Johnny Alpha uses "Time Bombs" to propel an enemy several seconds into the future, during which time the movement of the Earth causes the unfortunate victim to re-materialize in space. Other science fiction stories try to anticipate this objection and offer a rationale for the fact that the traveler remains on Earth, such as the 1957 Robert Heinlein novel The Door into Summer where Heinlein essentially handwaved the issue with a single sentence: "You stay on the world line you were on." In his 1980 novel The Number of the Beast a "continua device" allows the protagonists to dial in the six (not four!) co-ordinates of space and time and it instantly moves them there—without explaining how such a device might work. The television series Seven Days also dealt with this problem; when the chrononaut would be 'rewinding', he would also be propelling himself backwards around the earth's orbit, with the intention of landing at some chosen spatial location, though seldom hitting the mark precisely.[citation needed] In Piers Anthony's Bearing an Hourglass, the potent Hourglass of the Incarnation of Time naturally moves the Incarnation in space according to the numerous movements of the globe through the solar system, the solar system through the galaxy, etc.; but by carefully negating some of the movements he can also travel in space within the limits of the planet. The television series Doctor Who cleverly avoided this issue by establishing early on in the series that the Doctor's TARDIS is able to move about in space in addition to traveling in time
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thats why people travel back in time exactly a year...
but honestly, sometimes i just look into random spaces and kinda hope people come back from the future out of nowhere...would be pretty cool
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On June 10 2008 20:38 p23s3 wrote:
thats why people travel back in time exactly a year...
but honestly, sometimes i just look into random spaces and kinda hope people come back from the future out of nowhere...would be pretty cool
The Dandelion Girl
I do too 
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United States24788 Posts
Yeah it's definitely been thought of (I recall thinking the same thing at once point). Time travel of large objects is much more of a fiction topic than a scientific one at the moment... but I'm sure we'll keep trying (to our dismay most likely)
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On June 10 2008 20:38 p23s3 wrote:
thats why people travel back in time exactly a year...
but honestly, sometimes i just look into random spaces and kinda hope people come back from the future out of nowhere...would be pretty cool
Traveling back in time exactly a year would do you no good because the sun and the entire galaxy are both constantly moving so you'd still be MILES away from where you started.
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lol MILES away
the solar system alone is moving ~136.7 mi / s around the center of the galaxy
-_-
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Okay okay that was a bit of an understatement but you get my point.
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if you treat space as absolute then this is a problem
simple solution: don't.
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a bit weird looking for goofs when the entire concept is one.
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EPT
