Time Travel has a very serious problem
As a high school senior most of my day consists of "I could do my work, but like...?" And so I was looking at memes when I came across one of the boys vs. girls memes. It went something like this:
Girls with a time machine: omg I am your granddaughter
Boys with a time machine: oh no we forgot where we are in space [insert picture of gamer dude in the cosmos]
I can't believe this has never been addressed before. Like, if you travel back in time, most sources (eg. games, movies, books) assume that you will arrive exactly where you currently stand... just, in a different time.
So if you were to stand in Washington DC and went back 300 years ago, you'd still be standing on the area that is to become Washington DC. However, it's a very earth-centric perspective, as we are considering earth to be the limits of where we can be when we time travel.
Unfortunately, the theory that "Earth is the center of the universe" is a theory that was disproven many centuries ago and it's quite a shock for me to realize that I and many others (probably) are still adopting this mindset in regards to time travel.
We all know that the earth moves in a circle (correction: ellipse, are you happy math nerds??) around the sun. So if I went back in time to half a year ago, I would die instantly... because the earth is no longer in that area of orbit, and upon appearing at those coordinates where i time traveled, I would arrive in empty space. Let me show you a definitive illustration of what i mean:
We can take this one step further. According to Newton's first law, if you punch an apple, it will keep flying until something(s) stop it from moving. Thus, we can conclude that when reappearing in space, you will continue to hurtle at whatever velocity the earth was moving at.
In this drawing, I shall illustrate how it works (WARNING: BLOOD GORE VIOLENCE):
When you time traveled, we assume that the instantaneous velocity of earth was moving in the direction of the blue arrow. The magnitude of the velocity is 18 miles per second (source: ooogle) and I'm not a physicist but I don't think traveling at 18 miles per second is healthy for a human body.
Which means, assuming you had the foresight to put on a space suit, it wouldn't even help since you'd die pretty fast. Faster than running out of oxygen, anyways.
There is an obvious short-term solution, though - simply find the exact coordinates that earth is on, and match it with all the times that earth will be there in the past, and also into the future. This way, when you appear, you will be traveling at the exact same velocity in the exact same direction when you reappear back on the planet.
There are a few things wrong with it, though.
Obviously, over time, the landscape changes, so it would be a bit weird if you were to appear, and then suddenly, because you did not reappear on land, you started flying about. For simplicity, let's assume that if you appear somewhere close to the surface of the earth you will be fine.
But there's another possibility: reappearing inside of an existing object. Now that would be an awkward way to die.
"Bye guys, I'm going to the FUTURE!" You shout in glee as you activate the time machine, which teleports you to the future. Unfortunately, they built a building exactly where you were, and you clip into the building like a really badly designed video game or a really well designed 3D animation. Or maybe you went to the past, and clipped right into a rock face that was mined out in modern days.
So that's where the archaeologists found the strange fossil you read about as a little kid, your last thoughts go by and you die of... I don't know, exactly.
Example of a Time Machine
In his book about a time machine, creatively named The Time Machine, HG Wells's time machine sits in place as the user, inside the machine, can see everything around him happen in either fast forward or reverse. Of course, this is extremely convenient as the user can see when there is a structure being built right where the machine is located, and thus can avoid being clipped into something by simply continuing to travel in time.
The time traveler in the book notes that he saw many cycles of day and night, as they blurred together.
Of course, looking at this scene with our newly enlightened thoughts, we realize that HG Wells also commits the standard time machine blunder: the earth moves, too. So a more accurate description would have been "yeah I saw flashes of the earth and spent most of my time trying to time the time machine correctly to stop when the earth flashes by", as it is more logical to put the user on a wider, more expansive grid that just so happens to have earth as one of many components in it, rather than using the earth as the grid itself.
Which of course does not answer the question I'm sure many of you have: is the original meme sexist towards women???? Bye and thanks for reading
