It's a Matter of Time

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 13:49:00 -0500

I have a theory that time travel is already invented -- either now or in the future. In here, I explain why you've not yet met a time traveler.

I have this theory that someone in the future -- or heck, maybe someone today -- has figured out time travel.

The problem (in my theory) is that when you jump a person through time, things have changed. Earth has rotated. And then it made a move along its path around the sun. The sun itself is moving in a big orbit around the galaxy's center of gravity, and then the galaxy is moving through space.

That's not even the end of it. Space itself is actually expanding, according to our best understanding. So in the vast nothingness between the Milky Way and Andromeda, there's some new empty, over and above the amount of empty attributable to the galaxy's movements.

So if you time travel, how on earth do you land the traveler back where you want them?

Even if your margin of error is microscopic, it would be all too easy to drop a person 2 miles in the sky or 6 miles under the earth's crust.

Imagine the short feature that Back to the Future would be if the DeLorean had popped into existence in a pool of magma beneath the ground, failing to effect anything in 1959 whatsoever.

This is why I can't watch Sci Fi.

I started thinking this while listening to a new podcast, It's a Matter of Time. They don't discuss time travel seriously, but they do watch a 1969 TV show about time travel that you've never heard of. I listened only to episode 1, and I enjoyed it immensely. Give it a try when you have time (see what I did?).