Time Travel

With the new year I started to think about time travel. The wistful thinking of "wouldn't it be nice to go back or forward." Change some things for the better...

When Terry and I were going up Camelback Mountain, he said he thought someone had already invented time travel at some point and it went horribly wrong. Meaning, it worked for traveling in time. Then he explained a little bit. I'm expanding on his idea and fleshing it out.

Dr. Who has a TARDIS. It stands for "time and relative dimension in space. " To succeed in time travel you would need three calculations for space, x,y, and z. But the fourth number, let's call it "t," is the one that dictates where x,y, and z, are in space.

Think about it. The Earth rotates on it's axis at around 1000 mph at the equator. (As you get closer to the poles the rotation slows because the distance traveled is smaller and to keep up with the fast equator, you don't have to travel as fast.) The Earth revolves around the sun. Our sun, Sol, is spinning as part of the arm of the Milky Way galaxy, which is expanding from the center of the universe.

So the measurement that is "t" is a combination of the spin of the Earth, the revolution of the planet around the sun, the spin of the sun in the galactic arm, and the movement of the galaxy away from the center of the universe at an ever expanding rate.

So, say you make a machine that can travel in time, but not in space. You step inside to test it and go back in space one minute. If it doesn't travel in space, you are going to be at a point in outer space floating with the Earth rushing up to smack you into the place you left from.

If you take the same machine and travel one minute forward in time, but not in space, depending on where you start from in the revolution of the planet, the rotation of the Earth, the spin of the galaxy, there are a few outcomes. You could materialize in the planet. You could end up in outer space again with the planet quickly leaving you behind to float in outer space. Better than being stuck in a planet, I guess.

So think about it. As I sit here writing this blog. I'm moving, and I won't ever be in this same place again. London, where most of Dr Who's adventures took place, has never been in the same place twice. It, and everything, is on a spinning course thru the galaxy and universe. Your time machine would need to figure out where along the path to find the London you are searching for.

Maybe this is why Dr. Who ends up in places he doesn't belong. Missed calculations.

So how does Dr. Who do it? Well, it's a television show. It's not real and they can write any justification they want. So they have part of the Time Vortex in the TARDIS. This can see all points of time and space. Other wise you would need probably several super computers linked together to plot the positions of all planets and stars in an ever expanding universe.

So the safe way to time travel would to make the time machine a space ship, have all the large numbers crunched, and materialize in space close enough to a destination that you don't appear in it, or get smacked by it. In front might be best since it would save on whatever fuel source your ship uses to get you to the planet.

Whew! I'm going back to bed now.