this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts
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This is a basic fact overlooked by almost every time travel sci-fi. We wouldn't just jump into a machine and poof be in the exact same location 1,000 years ago.
It would be more like trying to land a spaceship on a planet light years away, there would have to be calculations for position and gravity. All sorts of crap before you even solve the impossible problem of turning back the clock.
Also we'd first have to figure out how to travel faster than light to even hope to break the riddle of time travel.
As fun as it is to theorize time travel would be impossibly complex and probably devastating to try.
Imagine what an object would do with all those forces behind it suddenly slamming into a object moving much slower, it would be like a time bullet that would tear apart the planet and punch a hole in space. We would likely achieve a black hole and destroy all of earth before we could see what earth looked like 1,000 years ago.
If the only reason you find the premise of traveling through time preposterous is that they didn't do the basic research to make it work, why not just assume they did? It's a fictional world. Just go with it.
For many I assume the device provides some kind of space-time anchor relative to itself, so when you go through the magic door it's already attached to itself on the other end. The "itself" on the other end doesn't need to be the whole machine, just enough molecules or whatever to lock on to. I like this idea because 1, it still leaves room for error so it isn't perfect and 2, I can stop thinking about it and enjoy the stupid movie.
The only theory I've seen that really holds any water is time travel going forward by using a ftl loop.