an interesting look at time travel...

[WaylanderToo]

 

[Alexa]

Maybe we should travel in the future, not in the past.

 

[Lumens]

Travelling into the future makes sense. The past, not so much...

How come a time machine always ends up on Earth, no matter what time of year it is... And that's not taking into consideration that the sun is orbiting the galaxy too. How does it know where to "land" in space?

Of course, the bigger problem is, how does a time machine travel into the past, to a time before it was made?

 

[HanaBi]

And would the parts on a time machine fail over time when travelling into the future?

 

[Alexa]

I imagine we may get stuck into the future and not able to go back in our own past.

Wait a minute ! They've already imagined that with Continuum series.

 

[Charles Gull]

There are some interesting points raised here. One of the most intelligent and well thought out novels to address some of these questions that I have read in recent times is 'In Times Like These' by Nathan van Coops (I am in no way affiliated to the author of Skylighter press no am I receiving any compensation for writing this. I just really liked the book).

I got it on Amazon as a perma-free for my kindle App.

Yes indeed, as it is infamously referred to as the 'Space/Time continuum model', you cannot consider one without the other.

Nevertheless, my own writing considers a second, slightly less fashionable model, the 'Mass/Time interference model'. It builds a universe almost exactly the same as the one we are familiar with but with 'benefits'.

 

[tinkerdan]

Ha. That ones in my to be read pile on the kindle::

There are some interesting points raised here. One of the most intelligent and well thought out novels to address some of these questions that I have read in recent times is 'In Times Like These' by Nathan van Coops (I am in no way affiliated to the author of Skylighter press no am I receiving any compensation for writing this. I just really liked the book).

::maybe I should dust it off it looks like it's been there since 1985 or so.

 

[Charles Gull]

::maybe I should dust it off it looks like it's been there since 1985 or so.

If you do, you may end up realising that you haven't even received the book yet..... I shall say nothing more.

 

[tinkerdan]

I'm sure it was somewhere around 1985 that the strange yellowish bubble infested package arrived with the Kindle Fire and charge cord; full loaded with books; delivered by some strange thing that hovered over the porch for a moment before it shot off into the distance:it had four propellers. The package had Amazon written across it.

However...if you read the book then you know that the travelers landed in 1985.

 

[Vertigo]

Effectively travel into the future is relatively trivial, given enough resources. You simply accelerate a spaceship to reasonably high relativistic speeds and fly in a big loop. When you get back to your starting point significantly more time has passed for everyone there than for you ie. you have arrived in the future.

For example if you travel for about ten years (your time) at around 30% the speed of light then when you return home about ten and half years will have passed for everyone there. IE. you have moved 6 months into their future. Sadly it has taken you ten years to achieve this, so not really the most efficient form of time travel out there but still...

 

[Lumens]

You could also find a black hole and circle it a few times (make sure you are at a safe distance!). Being in a gravity well slows down time, even here on Earth. Relativistic effects have to be accounted for in GPS satellites. So in a way, we are already time travelling.

Apart from the one second per second default, of course.

 

[Vertigo]

I was under the impression that the compensation for GPS satellites was due to their velocity relative to Earth. It only has to be a tiny error to have a big effect as we are dealing with radio signals travelling at the speed of light; a tiny timing error due to relativistic effects translates to a big distance.

However that's picking hairs. The point is there are already known ways to travel forward in time.

Travelling back in time... not so easy!

Incidentally @Lumens your complaint about the spatial problems of time travel due to Earth's spin, solar orbit and galactic orbit has always bugged me as well. Still that's just handwavium on top of handwavium!