But of course all this misses the point. There is no preferred reference frame.
So suppose your motion with respect to the Earth’s spin is not conserved.
And your motion with respect to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is not conserved.
And your motion with respect to the Sun’s motion through the Galaxy is not conserved.
And your motion with respect to the Milky Way’s motion through the observable universe is not conserved.
And this means…nothing. Because we can say that the Earth is screaming through the Universe at the blistering speed of 99.9999999% of the speed of light, it’s just that the galaxy and the local cluster and the rest of the observable universe are all co-moving with the Earth.
So when you teleport forward in time and find yourself 100 billion light years away, now you’ve found your preferred reference frame. And now we can use Einstein’s spinning motion in his grave as a perpetual motion machine for free energy.
Note that in any actual travel (not facilitated by wizards), whether you call it space travel, time travel, or space-time travel, you follow a particular path, which could be written down in terms of coordinates. Whether or not there are any planets there where you arrive and how fast you are going when you get there depends on the path you take, and can be predicted given that information.
Fictional time machines typically work by having you disappear from one space-time coordinate and re-appear in another space-time coordinate.
But that’s not how real things work. Instead things move from one space-time coordinate to another space-time coordinate.
Yeah, yeah, quantum teleportation. Except this only physically happens at scales that we scientists call “really really small”. If you’ve figured out a way to make this effect happen at macroscopic scales, then we’re in a land of wind and ghosts and there’s no telling what would “really happen”, because nothing we know about how the universe works will apply any more. Up is down, left is right, next Tuesday is 100 miles away, 1+1=blue, and the speed of light is ice cream.
I believe the point is that if you have no initial idea of the point of destination, it would be very hard to collect data as to how it is related to the settings of your spacetime transportator. You could send out a million probes, all equipped with radio beacons and systems to power them, and still not hear from a single one of them in millennia…!
Uhh…yeah… I kinda did that a couple years back on Park as it approaches 7th.
I was on (well, okay, OFF) the motorcycle at the time.
Were you there? Did you notice me wave (well, okay, flail) as I passed you?
Sorry about the half-hour delay – it was the mini-van driver’s fault!
