Mods: I’m not sure if this belongs here, but I didn’t think GQ was appropriate. I’m sorry if I guessed wrong. If so, please move it somewhere appropriate.
Okay, I’ve build a time machine and I’m ready to take it out for a test run. For my first try, I’m going to travel 6 months into the future. So I set the controls, hit the button, and in an instant I’m 6 months in the future.
But, as it turns out, I overlooked something. Although I’m in the same location in space as I was when I hit the button, the Earth is 6 months farther along in its yearly orbit . So it’s on the exact opposite side of the Sun from where I am. So I’m orbiting the Sun in vacuum and unprotected.
What I’m wondering is how I’ll die. Or really, what will kill me first. I figure there’s 4 major things out there that can kill me.
I can suffocate from all the air in me being sucked out. From each and every orifice I have.
B. I could explode from all the gases and liquids subliming out of me.
III. Half of me could burn to a crisp from direct exposure to unfiltered sunlight.
4th. The half of me in shadow could freeze from being exposed to the, what, 4° K (?) cold of space.
You won’t explode - that’s Hollywood stuff. You might suffer some damage from rapid decompression, especially if you try to hold your breath. As for what kills you, it’ll be suffocation I believe. Since you’ll end up spinning (from expelled breath if nothing else) I doubt you’ll see one side freeze while the other fries; and at any rate neither will kill you as fast as the lack of air.
I note that Wikipedia has an article on the effects of exposure to space.
Spider Robinson touched on this issue in one of his later books, possibly Callahan’s Con. I don’t remember how he resolved it…but the book was pretty forgettable as a whole.
Asimov’s Science Fiction has a story based on this exact premise in their most recent issue. One thought was to use this as a way to get payloads into space. The problem of course is no velocity so you need kick motors to get it in the proper orbit.
The motion of the sun orbiting the center of the galaxy is about 483,000 mp. So in six months it, and the earth, will have moved about 2116 million miles or 23 AU. That’s going to put you somewhere around the orbit of Uranus and not just 2 AU away on the other side of earth’s orbit. Then there’s the motion of the Milky Way relative to other galaxies or the background radiation.
It all depends on what you take as your reference point. Using the Earth seems just as good as any other.
Boiling won’t be much problem because the entire solar system is traveling through space on a path perpendicular to the planets rotational plane. IIRC, we’ll be about 2.25 trillion miles along the way. That’ll put you nearly 23AU behind the sun or about the distance of Uranus.
Far too late for an ETA, but the article I linked endeavors to demonstrate that the animation is fundamentally flawed. The major point being that the angle is 60 degrees rather than 90 as I stated and the video shows.
Interesting arguments but relatively moot to the statements that OldGuy and I made. That the solar system will have traveled trillions of miles during your 6 month jaunt.
But it does lead to an interesting question. What if the angle were 0 and all of the planets passed through the trail of the sun while they were on the backs sides of their orbits… What kind of effects would that have on our seasons?
You obviously have to cross-link your temporal coordinate readouts and spatial drift compensators, and then recalibrate them in order to synchronize your matter–energy fluxes.
I recommend you do everything through the main sensor array and deflector/navigational assembly.
And for the love of Og, don’t forget to reheat the gravitons and graviolies! If I have clean up one more time-beached space whale this week, I’m gonna flip out.
I’m not up on that. Where can I read about the axioms of time travel? I would think that your worldline is relevant to your future self, but not to your present-day self traveling into the future. That is, if you traveled into the future but stayed on your worldline the matter making up your body would coincide spatially with the matter of your future self’s body, causing all kinds of issues. This only works if you define time travel as moving your consciousness rather than your physical self, but then you get into the fact that consciousness is a manifestation of processes that occur in the brain and does not exist as an entity in its own right.
By the way, how do fiction writers deal with the preservation-of-matter problem that would occur with time travel?
