• CarbonIceDragon
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    83
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    A time machine would necessarily need to have some way of defining what reference frame one is stationary in space relative towards, because there is no universal frame that everything moves relative to. This suggests that a time machine ought to let you move through space as well as time

    • essteeyou@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      7 months ago

      So to travel into the future and be in the “same place” relative to your planet you’d need to solve the n-body problem for at least your local system to a suitable length of time. A slight error might mean you appear inside the planet or in outer space.

      Or maybe I don’t understand this stuff. :-)

      • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        25
        ·
        7 months ago

        Mass bends spacetime so one could assert that a time machine could anchor itself to a sufficiently large mass, just like how things in orbit are still bound to the earth’s mass.

      • SomeGuy69@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        You’d just send a drone back, to say 100 years ago, first and have it send you exact coordinates into the future.

        Time paradox aside you’d probably have this data already, with all alternatives and can correctly time jump right away.

        • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          7 months ago

          But by the time you have collected and evaluated all the drone data you and all the masses around you would already be in a totally different configuration, making the data useless.

          But maybe a little jump to the time when you sent the drone out would be easier and then you could use the drone’s data.