Context: He’s in the files

  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    There’s no universal frame of reference. Any theoretical time travel would likely need a beacon of some sort to calibrate their arrival point, meaning you couldn’t travel back beyond the point time travel was established.

    • cynar@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      You can easily cross calculate between various, inertial frames of reference. The problem is that earth isn’t sitting still in an inertial frame. We spin around the sun, and we orbit the center of our galaxy. We also get nudged about by the pull of other stars.

      Tracking a time jump (or technically a time-space jump) would be easy, if you just wanted to be within the solar system. With measurements the earth-moon gap would not be too hard. Hitting a surface exactly would be another story. Miss by a meter and your cut in half by a wall or floor.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      You know what they say: the best time to build a time machine is 50 years ago.

      I think that’s basically the movie Primer too, they’d turn the machine on, go hide in an apartment for X amount of time, then go back to the machine and emerge 5 minutes after they turned it on and just walked away.

      But gravity effects time, sticking close to a planet isn’t going to be hard.

      Ironically enough the first (if we ever get them) time machines are going to be a hell of a lot like modern “UFOs” are described. You couldn’t risk landing on the planet, elevation changes are what’s really a nightmare to account for. Show up and hour early and everything is a foot higher because of how fast we’re spinning.

      So you’d want a space craft, because space is big and empty. And realistically it’s going to take something bigger than a telephone booth or even the 1980s embodiment of Florida on four wheels with a hood designed to do cocaine off of to house a time machine.

      • marcos@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Show up and hour early and everything is a foot higher because of how fast we’re spinning.

        Any actual process for doing it would probably be continuous in some way. Even if it’s just the machine making that part of the trip. Just leaving existence at some time and arriving at a different one doesn’t make a lot of sense.

        So, just more reason to do it in space.

        • TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub
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          16 hours ago

          Imagine your time machine has spiders at the time of your arrival, because it had a small defect that grew into an opening after several years.

          “Ha ha, I can’t see anything, but it seems like time travel tickles”

        • nymnympseudonym@piefed.social
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          2 hours ago

          thermogoddamics

          Bless you for furthering this meme

          Arbeit macht Frei… but also, Arbeit is the energy transfer that occurs when a force is applied to move an object over a distance

        • UniversalBasicJustice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          14 hours ago

          So if I was going to correct you by referencing the thermodynamic law that forbids “never stopping” but upon further inspection determined that was the joke in the first place, does that mean I have created an example of the zeroth law?