My decision was made. I jumped into a time machine that would take me back to the place where my nemesis ended my beloved’s life only one year before. Much to my chagrin, when I materialized, I had forgotten that the universe is constantly in motion, and as my second eyeball exploded in the vacuum, I wondered just how far away I was from the pale blue dot that I had called home.
Signed,
Lost in Space
The notion is nobbled by the fact that there’s no such thing as an absolute frame of reference.
Noted, and you could also consider the general relativity distance issues. Assume the Earth time frame of reference.
Also.
I don’t think your eyeballs would explode in a vacuum.
Finally… It’s not a novel question - I’ve seen this in several forms in different SF stories.
It’s not a question- novel or otherwise.
If you’re quick, you could return back to your present time, go back in time to just before you initially left and tell your other self to remember to equip the DeLaurean with some life support and a sealed cabin (like in Bill & Ted).
If you going to go to the trouble to invent something impossible, like a time machine, you should at least throw in some extras, like a spoiler, pressurized cabin, gravity lock, and collision avoidance technology.
If you ever get back, please bring a question(and pie).
Moved. samclem GQ moderator
Remember the trash can!
Wyld Stallyns rule!
Re: eyeball explosion–you eyeball is effectively a closed system at a pressure slightly greater than atmospheric; hence when you are suddenly in a vacuum, there will be a large pressure differential across the lens…it may not explode, but I would expect a rupture of the tissue. Especially after the outer membrane freezes as the ocular humor starts to boil.
Re Sci Fi stories References? Not doubting they exist, but I wouldn’t mind reading them.
And [my] finally…the short bit of prose assumes the reader is clever enough to get the meaning of the blurb, i.e. if you pick a reference point, how far will the earth move relative to an (assumed) static position in one earth year. Based on your rather uninformed sarcasm, either I’ve written above my intended audience, or you are ‘That Guy’ that assumes he’s smarter than everybody else because he can pick a nit.
I remeber seeing this point being used in a Superman story, probably dating back to the Sixties. Some alien group had put a force field or something around the entire Earth, to keep Supes from leaving. So ol’ Supes travels in time, without making his usual correction for the movement of the Earth, so he arrives in outer space, the Earth having moved in the interval.
Sorry, can’t give a title or cite.
Any time machine must also necessarily be a spaceship (be it “superluminal”, using some sort of wormhole or warp field, or whatever).
As a fan of time-travel fiction, once you suspend disbelief in time travel being impossible, everything else follows.
This sounds like the kind of thing that gets handwaved away in SF stories because the plot would have a difficult time going anywhere if time travel required not only a space ship, but looking for Earth (if not the entire galaxy) and associated travel time. Besides, there are more interesting problems to explore.
I don’t think this question is possible to answer without more information. Sure the Earth moves, and you say if you jumped forward in time but not in space, the Earth will have moved…but it only moved relative to the Sun. But then, the Sun has also moved, so you have to account for that…but relative to what? The center of the galaxy? Well, that’s moving too, with respect to the rest of the galaxies in the local group. The whole local group itself is hurling toward the mysterious Great Attractor. So you want your time machine to stay static with respect to the Great Attractor? Seems like a rather arbitrary reference point. Might as well pick some random quasar 5 billion light years away. There’s no absolute coordinate system or frame of reference, so it’s just easier to have the time machine stay static relative to the Earth.
It all depends on how exactly the time machine works. How does it move through the fabric of space-time? Unless you’re going c, if you move through time you’re also moving through space. If you happen to go c, then for you all of space becomes infinitely contracted to a zero point, though once you stop you still end up some place different from where you started. I’m not sure what happens when you go faster than c, which would theoretically allow backwards time travel, but I would imagine you’d still travel through space as well. If we’re talking magic teleportation time travel, well then we can just magic away any coordinate mishaps.
According to the People’s Almanac, when you take the various different vectors into account, the Earth is moving at an average rate of 250 miles per second. So over the course of a year, it moved approximately 7,889,400,000 miles from your starting point. To give it a sense of proportion, the farthest Pluto gets from the Sun is about 4,583,189,132 miles. So you’re pretty well out there.
What if we pretend that gravity still works when you are time traveling? Some people* think that gravity works throughout multiple dimensions. So if we think of time as the 4th dimension, then gravity might still have a hold on you when you are time traveling, and keep you on the earth.
I know little about physics, so there might be absolutely no merit to this idea. It still might be passable enough to use in SF.
*Link is to a Charlie Rose interview with Lisa Randall, a physicist that thinks gravity works through multiple dimensions.
Fairly sure one of Clark Ashton Smith’s fantasy worlds was first reached by a would-be time-traveller who got lost in this manner … it’s not Zoothique or Averoigne, so it must be one of the others …
Unless I’m completely wrong, and it’s Robert Howard’s Almuric. But there’s definitely a gimmick along those lines somewhere around that timeframe.
The science fiction writer James White (of the “Sector General” stories) wrote novel called Tomorrow is Too Far featuring time-travel-as-space-travel.
In the comic-strip Strontium Dogs that featured (or still features) in the UK’s 2000AD the main character had a weapon called a time-bomb, it sent people back in time a few minutes and they came to in space away from the earth and died in the vacuum.