“nobody ever talks about this”
This has been talked about a lot.
Also it doesn’t make much sense since there’s no universal frame of reference. The time machine in the comic stays in place with respect to the sun which isn’t really different from it staying in place with respect to the Earth.
The only real options are to have it essentially be a teleporter too (like the TARDIS) or to let it stay in place like usual. Making you move some random distance based on a randomly chosen inertial system is just dumb.
I thought that was the premise of the show “7 Days” where the protagonist was put in like a time capsule thing and had to guide it both through time and space to land around where the Earth / location was at that time.
It’s also right there in the name of Dr. Who’s vehicle, the TARDIS: Time And Relative Dimension In Space.
Yeah IIRC a TARDIS is supposed to have a crew of about half a dozen people or so, and is also somewhat sentient which helps with landing in the right place. But the Doctor does it solo and the TARDIS is broken and slightly bonkers which is why it’s fairly random where it ends up.
Yeah and not only that the earth goes around the sun, the solar system is moving withing the milky way, not to mention the whole universe expanding lol
There are no coordinates. All distances and positions are relative. No such thing as an absolute position in our weird universe.
Also you’re not exapanding. The space is, but not matter, and the forces between the particles that make up your body keep them in the same relative distance. Same with the solar system and the galaxy. The expansion only really comes into play on scales much larger than the galaxy.
“Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It’s orbiting at 19 miles a second,
so it’s reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me,
and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.”
https://youtu.be/buqtdpuZxvk
If your time machine relies on entangled particles (which it should) then distance and placement doesn’t matter. You’d be sending information back to the time and place the entangled particle existed in at the target time.
Exactly, and I always thought the machine itself wouldn’t travel, so you’d just be stuck.
Actually, there is no universal reference frame, so unless your time travel method requires a specific one, you’re going to need some mechanism to determine where in space you end up too. It makes some sense for a time machine to actually be a spaceship as well, even, because a time machine and a faster than light drive are fundamentally the same technology.
