[Cannikin]

Ok, suspend thoughts of disbelief here, and just for a bit imagine if time machines were real...

Say you have a time machine and decide to go into the future a couple days to check the the stock market and/or see the winning lottery numbers. You turn it on, and set it to a week in the future. You materialize one week in the future. Except, the Earth isn't there... As your body fluids boil and your body explodes into a bloody, frozen mess, you struggle to figure out what went wrong.

In reality, NOTHING went wrong. The machine did exactly what it was supposed to: It transported you one week in the future, at the exact location you were when you left. BUT, the one thing that you forget is that the Earth, and the entire solar system, is constantly on the move, traveling tens of thousands of miles per hour and are never in the same position at any two given points in time. Thus, when you materialize at the exact same point in space, the Earth has already moved a million miles away, leaving you to suffer in the cold, (relative) void of space.

So, a time machine will be completely useless, unless you can also select what point in space you travel to, and you're very good at math so you can calculate exactly where the location you want to get to will be at any given point in time (which would involve so many variables, even CP would have a hard time ).

Just another thing I can add to my list to punch gigantic holes in lame sci-fi concepts.

[Carl]

what makes you think gravity won't affect the time machine while it's going into the future?

[an0n]

If you could traverse along the 4th dimension and defy/bend the laws of quantum entropy, then I should think navigating the other 3-dimensions wouldn't be too hard.

[Stealth]

Originally posted by an0n
If you could traverse along the 4th dimension and defy/bend the laws of quantum entropy, then I should think navigating the other 3-dimensions wouldn't be too hard.

but we can't... so there

[CP5670]

Actually, how can it calculate the position to put you at in the  new space anyway? It could not put at the same position unless that position is given relative to something else, so you might as well make it relative to the Earth.

[Galemp]

Could be why no time travellers have come back... ever time they try they pop out into the void somewhere and explode in a cloud of frozen needles of blood.

[Stealth]

Originally posted by CP5670
Actually, how can it calculate the position to put you at in the  new space anyway? It could not put at the same position unless that position is given relative to something else, so you might as well make it relative to the Earth.

he's trying to confuse us again

Originally posted by CP5670
Could be why no time travellers have come back... ever time they try they pop out into the void somewhere and explode in a cloud of frozen needles of blood.

or it could be that no one has ever traveled through time!!!

if someone HAD, then the whole world would knwo about it, and would be wondering why he hasn't come back

[an0n]

*remembers about his Nth-dimensional-chess project*

[diamondgeezer]

Originally posted by Carl
what makes you think gravity won't affect the time machine while it's going into the future?

Kinetics. Perhaps inverse, perhaps not.

Failing that, tachyons.

[heretic]

Originally posted by GalacticEmperor
Could be why no time travellers have come back... ever time they try they pop out into the void somewhere and explode in a cloud of frozen needles of blood.

at least they'd have 28 seconds to kick themselves in the ass

[Stunaep]

I've seen this theory before, and it has been disproven. I can't remember for sure, but basically it has to do with inertia, and such like. It's like when you jump up on a moving train, you land on the same spot you jumped from. The same is true with Time Travel.

[an0n]

Originally posted by Stunaep
I've seen this theory before, and it has been disproven. I can't remember for sure, but basically it has to do with inertia, and such like. It's like when you jump up on a moving train, you land on the same spot you jumped from. The same is true with Time Travel.

Yeah, over the space of a few hours or a day maybe, but over a week, the curvature of the Earth's orbit would leave you a coupla hundred feet in the air.

[Stunaep]

well, add gravity to this, and you get no movement whatsoever.

[an0n]

.........Gravity is a constant which is securely fixed in it's motion and interaction with/within the 4th dimension. So by travesring the 4th dimension you'd either be crushed by infinite gravity or completely immune to it. Either way you'd be screwed.

[diamondgeezer]

Thus... proving that time travel is impossibe?

[Tiara]

Lets just keep it at this :

We, humanity, are just too stupid to figure this out at this time.

[Carl]

we're traveling through time as we speak.

[CP5670]

Well, it looks like the original subject is about time travel into the future, which is known to be quite possible if you can somehow reach the required relative speeds. For time travel in the other direction, you would need some tachyons or something like that.

we're traveling through time as we speak.

lol that just came to mind as well...

[Stealth]

yeah, i was thinking about that too!

let's say we're talking about "traveling to the future at a faster rate than normal"

[mikhael]

Originally posted by Cannikin
Ok, suspend thoughts of disbelief here...

Are we suspending belief after you come up with the idea of time machines or after you decide to invoke reality anyway and say they are impossible?

So, a time machine will be completely useless, unless you can also select what point in space you travel to, and you're very good at math so you can calculate exactly where the location you want to get to will be at any given point in time (which would involve so many variables, even CP would have a hard time ).

Any position in space-time can be expressed by XYZ (spatial coordinates) and tau (temporal offset from zero) with relation to some arbitrary unmoving body. "Unmoving" is used here in the relative sense.

What you're saying is that Professor Smarty McBrainbox can invent a machine that lets him target a tau coordinate but not an XYZ coordinate. You put this idea forward despite the fact that people in the past, with computers with less than 64KB of RAM managed to calculate elliptical curves through space with enough accuracy to put payload after payload on Mars, the Moon and Venus and into stable orbits around many more astronomical bodies. You're saying that somehow, if he figures out how to shift his tau coordinate arbitrarily, he somehow forgets the last 40yrs of astrophysics.

Yeah, lets suspend disbelief. All we have to do is shut off our brains completely, evidently.