I'm not smart enough to invent time travel, but I still have some ideas.
8d 7h ago by lemmy.world/u/Lost_My_Mind in justpost
Ok, so I'm thinking about time travel and smoking pot. Beautiful combination, I know.
Anyways, I started thinking about the orbit of earth. and that got me thinking about If you stop time right now, we're on THIS side of the sun. But earth is round. The sun is round. The earth is constantly moving around the sun. Which means in 6 months, we'll be on THAT side of the sun. Which means, if I traveled back in time 6 months, I'd be in the right year, but I'd be on THIS side of the sun, but Earth would be on THAT side of the sun. So unless this time travel method has a sufficient oxygen supply, and a method of space travel/landing, then instantly you're dead.
But that got me thinking. What if......the sun isn't actually stationary? What if it seems stationary, because we revolve around IT, but in turn IT revolves around something else? So what if 1 year from now, earth isn't actually back where it started? What if it's entirely somewhere new, because it's following the sun through space? What if our whole galaxy is self contained, and revolving freely around other galaxies? What if our whole galaxy is like the scale of 1 atom in the grand scheme of things?
That's why we can't time travel. We are not advanced enough. We don't carry the mental capacity to grasp it. Just like a housefly can't develop the mental capacity to play chess. What if we are nothing? The whole collective universe is a building material on a microscopic level, to build something bigger? What if the galaxy is what's important, and we're more like the bacteria coating the material? And that's why we keep having life ending world events. Something is just trying to kill the parasites. It killed the dinosaurs. It had 2 ice ages, with historians arguing there may have been more. No one's for certain what happened. We're reaching beyond our grasp.
And if you could time travel to your previous year, do you take the place of your time appropriate self? So are you like a 5 year old in the 1980s, but you have the mentality of a mid 40s guy? Or is there just like a second version of you running around? One of you is 5 years old. One of you is 42 years old. Both of you are the same person, and by the very nature of you existing at that age in that year, will inevitably change the future via the butterfly effect?
Have we experienced the butterfly effect? What if originally the nazis won? What if the 1945 nazis took over the planet? And then someone time traveled, and said "This sucks, lets kill hitler as a baby?" But then the nazis grew even stronger. So the go back in time to stop themselves, and instead let the nazis win a little bit, but then collapse, because any other outcome is worse? And what if 9/11 killed 3,000 people, but stopping it somehow kills 20,000 people? So you stop yourself from stopping 9/11?
But no matter what you believe, can we all at least agree that the Delorian was a cool looking car, but it would make for an AWFUL time machine! Seriously, if you travel back in time to an era before civilization, there's a really good chance you can't hit 88mph, because EVERYTHING IS A GOD DAMNED FOREST!!!
Thats why the wealthy want to speed up global warming. They want to cut the trees down so we can get more time traveling visitors. Probably to get stock tips. Maybe the lottory is a scam, and established for the time travelers to make it worth their while to invest in time machines. So the rich get richer, and fuck you for being born. It's a big club, and you ain't in it.
What if…the sun isn’t actually stationary?
It isn't. You might want to google the concept of "galaxy"
This image might help you visualise it:
you know, this is really mean, because in school i was indeed always taught that the sun is stationary, which made me quite confused about galaxies for some time as well.
because in school i was indeed always taught that the sun is stationary
Was that some religious school or something? Because that is very strange teaching as for modern era.
I mean it all depends on your point of reference. If you're trying to teach about the solar system and the heliocentric model then yeah, the sun is stationary since
theres a great little book called timescape
its involves tachyon particles which are theorized to have a property resembling traveling faster than the speed of light.. anyway... in the book a future dying earth sends a tachyon beam to the point in space where earth once was in effort to stop the world from destroying itself with petrochemicals.
most of the book is spent in the 60s while a scientist is wrestling with the fact his experiment is spitting out chemical symbols of an unknown origin.
spoiler-title
no one takes the guy seriously and they shelf his work. a bit later, a curious student is retrieving the scientists work from the local school book depository when he stumbles upon someone attempting to assassinate the president.
Think that's weird? What about: Why do we think it's possible to travel backwards in time, but never think about what it would mean to travel "backwards" in space? How would that even work?
I mean, you can think about putting a car in reverse, but that's just a human design convention. Like, a ball doesn't have an inherent direction; no matter its motion, it's moving "forward." So if somehow we made a machine to reverse direction on the spacetime path of an object, what does it mean for a ball to move backwards through space?
If the machine just changes the time component of its spacetime path, so it moves through space "forward," with normal translation of x, y, and z coordinates, but over ⁻t, then at the instant of switching time direction, the machine is still essentially in the same spatial (x, y, z) location, and will immediately collide with its +t self going the other direction. And whatever momentum it had will encounter the same magnitude of momentum in the opposite direction, and since the Earth is spinning, the galaxy is spinning, etc., it's going to happen with quite a bang.
Except how can matter collide with itself? Another possibilty is that the time machine just moves back along the spacetime path along which it arrived at (x, y, z, t), like a film run backwards. Then, it would be impossible to change the past, as by switching the direction of time, the machine would be on the same deterministic path back to before we turned it on; turning it on would instantly turn it off.
So the implicit way that time machines in fiction work is that they have to completely cease to exist (probably with a sound as if thousands of people gathered there said, "foop!") in the universe at (x, y, z, t), and instantaneously resume existence ("whop!") at (x', y', z', t') without passing through any intermediate coordinates. But since the Earth spins, the galaxy spins, the local galactic supercluster spins, time is all wibbley-wobbley depending on how fast you're moving relative to other things, and there is no fixed reference point for anything, there's no way for a time machine to lock onto (x', y', z', t'), even if there was a way to get information about distant locations faster than c.
This is about the point when I wish I was high...
[off topic]
"The Big Time" by Fritz Lieber.
Two alien empires, the Snakes and the Spiders, have been at war since before the Big Bang. The war reaches all of time and space. Earth is a tiny battleground of almost no importance, except for the people who die.
The Law of Conservation of Reality means that it takes thousands, sometimes millions, of tiny changes to affect any aspect of history. Go back and shoot Hitler, and he'll recover instantly, or be replaced by a double.
What coincidence. I watched back to the future with my daughter last night, as an attempt to raise my kid well.