Five Problems We Need To Figure Out Before We Can Time Travel

 [Posted by Ted H]

Oh, hi there! It's only been *checks notes* oh dear...a while. Life comes at you fast, but long story short, I've been trying to get words to paper (or typed) with some ideas for a while...Trust me?

Anyway, here's some lil thing I pounded out about time travel. Kinda incoherent, but it serves as a drought breaking update while I try to organize some projects.

I have done some writing, but pretty much all non-fiction baseball related stuff that you can read about over at my other project: MLB Showdown Obsession

------------------------------------------------

[Five Problems We Need To Figure Out Before We Can Time Travel ]


The subject of time travel has been something we for some reason take very seriously. And while the science of such a feat is constantly being questioned by philosophers and laughed at by "legitimate" scientists, the fact remains that even if we perfect the design and create a way to break through the time barrier, there are still some legitimate problems we need to work around if we're going to make this work. Problems like...

1-Keeping up with the Earth

The earth is not exactly stationary. If you've ever tossed something out the window of a moving vehicle, you might notice the object falling down in relation to where you dropped it, not in relation to where your vehicle now is. The same concept applies to time travel. You rip a hole in the space time continuum and travel to it, you'll pop out of that hole in the same location relative to its place in the universe. The earths location will not apply. It doesn't have time to wait around for your bull shit, it's got places to be.

Where the earth is will depend on where you travel, how far you went, and where the earth was going at the time. Most people know (we hope) that the earth is moving around the sun, but the actual speed is less than common knowledge. We revolve around the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour, so yeah, we're moving pretty damn fast. We never notice the speed because there's no friction hitting the earth as it goes around the sun on account of it's fucking space! If earth's gravity suddenly no longer applied to you, you'd be left behind so fast you'd be in space before you can blink...and that's assuming you survive the force of suddenly leaving earth's atmosphere, which you certaintly will not.

The sun isn't exactly stationary either in all this though. It too is moving at around 52,000 miles per hour. This isn't an exclusive phenomenon to us either since literally everything in the universe is moving...at the same time...in different directions and different speeds...speeding up and slowing down based on the gravity of larger bodies and things crashing around at random. Keep in mind the traffic of the universe as this is happening, all making it pretty damn hard to pinpoint exactly where we need to land when we come out the other end (more on that later).

So, you shoot through your little time portal and come out the other side 24 hours into the future. That'll put you, on average, about three million miles away from where the earth was yesterday assuming that the only things moving are the earth and the sun. Forget just a day though; let's go see if Jesus was the real deal and go back 2000 years! Again, if just the sun and earth are moving, you'll come out 2,010,000,000,000 miles away from the earth, or one-third of a light-year.

Most time machines in popular culture wouldn't allow you to survive for two seconds once you appear in the vacuum of space, let alone give you any sustained chance of returning to earth. Are we saying that the TARDIS is something to shoot for in a time machine?.......maybe? But it's not like you needed much convincing there. Hell, most of you are already sketching designs that look like police boxes and phone booths.

But coming out of the time hole a couple trillion miles from your target planet shouldn't be as high on your list of issues to deal with until you've figured out...


2-Keeping your ass alive in space

You're at the ass end of the galaxy, and even if you knew which way the earth is, getting there alive is gonna be a real god damn problem. Getting anywhere in a timely manner is gonna be a bit of a problem.

For example, let's go with the Voyager mission. The Voyagers were launched in 1977. After a bit of a tour of the planets, NASA decided to send the probes out of the solar system, presumably after a Night of the Living Dead marathon and deciding they didn't want no space radiation zombies. In 1990, Voyager 1, traveling at about 325 million miles a year (or 37,000 mph), went passed Pluto. In 2013, it reached interstellar space. Astute readers will note the over 20 year gap between reaching the final [stick your dwarf classification for Pluto up your ass] planet and the actual exit to our solar system. Others will note the over 35 years it took to even get there from earth.

So when you come out from your time trip, and you realize that the earth isn't exactly down the street from where you left it, you're also going to realize that it's gonna take a while to fly to it through space. At this point you'll regret not letting your mom pack you a lunch for this trip.


3-The future will kill you, the past will kill you HARDER

In the process of being conquered, the American Indians had to deal with rampant diseases like smallpox that kicked their asses more than war did. It wasn’t something done by the Europeans maliciously, just accidentally. The blankets weren’t intentionally infected, it was just a byproduct that smallpox was a thing, but somewhat manageable to the Europeans, so it didn’t occur to them that it might be deadly to people who have never been exposed to such things to build any immunity to.

So for all intents and purposes, the Europeans and American Indians might as well have been time travelers. Hell, if you wanna travel to Africa now, you need about a million shots because your fragile immune system built by the civilized world would be raped otherwise. So, what do you think will happen if you travel to the future where new diseases have evolved and are introduced to your body that has never experienced anything like that before? How can you schedule immunizations for things that don’t exist yet?

What about society? If you’re black, good luck in the past, but what about the future for anyone? What’s to say that society doesn’t hate on whitey? What if your country gets conquered and as soon as you step out of your time machine, you immediately get arrested for being [insert race/color/sexuality]. Again, there’s no way to check how the future will unfold, so you have no idea what kind of world you’re stumbling into.

“Ok, ok,” you say “The future is uncertain. I’ll play it safe in the past.”

That is a terrible idea. Play some Red Dead Redemption and now wanna hang out in the old west? The food back then will kill you. The human body today has adapted to all the food we enjoy with preservatives and quality control...yes, and microplastics. Your digestive system will more likely seize and self-destruct when you try to eat ANYTHING.

Besides, existing in the past is a bad idea because...


4-Paradoxs

Besides the almost scientific fact that crippled people host terrible parties, another reason why the Stephen Hawkins alleged time travelers party was such a failure was because any time traveler who heard about the party would trigger a paradox by attending.

You can be as careful as possible to not alter the past, but an untold about of unforeseen consequences can occur that you never planned for. It’s the butterfly effect.

Example:

a-Your dog Fido got hit by a car.

b-You are determined to prevent that.

c-You build a time machine. This takes about a week...let’s say you found instructions for it on the dark web.

d-You go back and succeed in saving Fido.

e-You get cute and write a note to yourself to build a time machine, eliminating the potential paradox of no longer having the reason to build the time machine.

f-Ignoring the fact that you’ve effectively created a branching timeline where you now have two versions of the building a time machine origin story, the universe hasn’t exploded yet. If this logic works for the Terminator movies, it can work here...

g-Saving Fido had unforseen consequences. With Fido still alive for that middle week you’re building a time machine, you go out and buy food. The extra few minutes you take to buy dog food for the dog that is still alive puts you out of sync form the original timeline.

h-Your trip home from the store was originally uneventful, but now a few minutes off from that schedule, you end up getting into a car accident and become incapacitated. Now you can’t create that time machine, meaning Fido dies again, meaning you build a time machine to save him, meaning you save him and leave a note, meaning you get back into that accident, meaning Fido dies, meani-Owe! My brain! Paradox.

The universe has no time for this crap and will awkwardly reset into you never being able to create that paradox. Now, instead, you get into that car accident the first time before you can ever go back in time at all. Ever wonder why crazy and unlikely shit goes down sometimes? Probably a paradox, keeping the universe running as smooth as it can.

And there’s no way to plan for these butterfly effects. The only way to know you’ve caused a paradox is only after you’ve caused it, which is right before the universe corrects it, which will trigger before you can cause the paradox, which means the correction will occur before you know you’re causing it. If that makes little to no sense, that’s because it’s fucking time travel logic! I think my brain is bleeding, let’s move on.


5- I thought I said the past will fucking kill you?

If you're really hell bent on going backwards in time, but think you’re smart by going back to before all of humanity to minimize the chance you’ll have terrible consequences on the timestream...then you clearly haven’t been listening.

Where you gonna go? Dinosaur era? I don’t have the time or patience to explain why you’re dead a hundred times over. They’re fucking dinosaurs! Did the Jurassic Park movies and their constantly declining quality teach you nothing? So just go back farther, right? Don’t go back too far. 350 million years ago won’t have murderous dinos, but you will suffocate in seconds. I’m talking about the Carboniferous Period, where oxygen levels were much much more dense. And it must be that way, because that’s how the giant bugs of that period could breathe. Oh yeah, I hope you like giant bugs.

Be careful where you go in time, by the way, because contrary to what those “stop global warming” people tell you, Earth’s current climate is in no way how it’s always been (or how it always will be for that matter, but that’s an entirely different can of worms). There have been various ice ages, including when the entire planet was completely encased in ice (not mostly, the entire fucking planet), completely covered in molten lava and fire (and not just from some asteroid strikes), and not to mention the numerous extinction level events and disasters that have swept over the lands. Meanwhile, most people can’t function outside their climate-controlled homes and offices.

You wanna find a safe time to land on the Earth during the formation of the solar system? Good luck breathing, but even then, look out for when a fucking planet crashed into us, created the moon and made the Earth what it is today. That’s right, a fucking planet hit us.


So the next time you daydream about galivanting through time, like you’re a straight version of Dr Who, remember some very important and unavoidable pitfalls: You’ll most likely get lost on the wrong end of space, all but certainly mess up the timeline and not even realize it, and you will definitely die a horrible and anonymous death.