Current Events > The problem with time travel in fiction

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A lot of books, movies and TV shows use time travel as a plot point. While they deal with paradoxes with mixed results, there is something else that goes unnoticed (but bugs me).

Time travel is always coupled with teleportation, but is never talked about. In egregious examples, a character will time travel to the time of the dinosaurs and magically relocate to wherever the dinosaurs are in the process. But a subtler problem would occur if one simply time traveled by a single day.

If a character is in Omaha and goes back in time by a day, they would find themselves floating in space, thousands of miles from earth. In other instances, a character could time travel into a wall or an animal or something.

Maybe this is never brought up be cause it overly complicates time travel, but even the more scientific sci-fi brushes it off.

Time travel is impossible but it is an interesting thought experiment.

im traveling through time right now

I want to remember that some comic character used chrono grenades that put the victims 12 or 24 hours into the past without teleporting them to where the planet was then.

I mean its probably overlooked or ignored for entertainment sake but knowing space and time are intwined it actually makes a little sense that the traveling or coordinates isn't mutually exclusive and the character travels through both equally.

The 10-year bazooka in Reborn is stupid

A lot of time-travel stories deal with the idea of traveling to the wrong location / time

The movie Timecop once sends the protagonist in front of a moving car

The television show 12 Monkeys also sends characters in front of cars, accidentally

Not only do the characters go to the wrong location, but often the characters make mistakes that have unintended consequences on the timeline

I mean, I'm pretty sure most stories don't go into that because it'd be pointless to do so. Getting trapped in a wall only becomes relevant if it actually happens, and who's gonna write a story about time travel just to end it like that?

It's one of those things that's handwaved with time travel (which itself already requires a handwave) because it's not relevant to the plot unless it needs to be.

Isn't that one of the reasons why people fellated Interstellar so hard because the idea of falling through time in a blackhole is slightly more scientifically plausible?

I'm pretty sure you could use math to track where earth is in the solar system based on when. But your points about obstacles still stands.

Derwood posted...

If a character is in Omaha and goes back in time by a day, they would find themselves floating in space, thousands of miles from earth

We assume that solving this problem is part of solving the problem of time travel.

That's only if they try to justify it with science nonsense. It's why I can only stomach time travel in settings with magic and even then I'd rather it not get too convoluted with infinite timelines and shit.

So if time travel was real it would have to coincide with the present somehow?

ThePrinceFish posted...

im traveling through time right now

at the convenient pace of 60 s/m?

That reminds me of a TV series called Seven Days.
NSA got a time machine that can go back in time seven days and it was used to stop terrorist attacks and other bad stuff from happening.
When it went back in time, the pilot had to use a joystick to "steer it right". The machine shaked like hell so that was extremely hard. That steering controlled how close the machine would get to the starting point, and being just a little bit off could place you many miles in the wrong direction.

Derwood posted...

If a character is in Omaha and goes back in time by a day, they would find themselves floating in space, thousands of miles from earth. In other instances, a character could time travel into a wall or an animal or something.

A good way to get around this would be an anchor, like a time travel machine where the earliest they can go back is to when the machine was first turned on. And it works by having the character stand on a platform or pod surrounded by a stasis field, they travel and arrive on the same platform/pod.

Not that they ever use real science, but Dark Energy, for example, if it existed like a cloud on earth (let's say you turned into a cloud of Dark Energy instantly) is effected by gravity and yet it doesn't interact with matter normally. After exactly a year of going around in a crazy orbit you would find yourself in EXACTLY the same spot on Earth, even though the Earth isn't in the exact same space in the solar system.

So, the process of time travel then involves converting matter into anti-time dark energy (dark energy that travels backwards in time). based on the orbit's calculations we should be able to determine exactly where we end up!

iPhone_7 posted...

A good way to get around this would be an anchor, like a time travel machine where the earliest they can go back is to when the machine was first turned on. And it works by having the character stand on a platform or pod surrounded by a stasis field, they travel and arrive on the same platform/pod.

that's the time machines in Primer.

I don't think Event Horizon has time travel

Event Horizon just opens a portal to hell with its FTL drive.

There is a movie with the guy that played Robin, set in New Orleans, that uses the place you time travel and the place you end up as a plot point.

Explain it away with some Mumbo jumbo about how time travel is linked to the strongest gravitational force field

There was a short by the guy that did Rejected Cartoons that had this where a clone goes back in time to talk with the original who was a little girl. She talked about how some people who used a cheaper time travel machine were just popped into space.

It got a lot of shit but that's one of the things I like about how Quantum Break handled time travel. You can only go back to the point of when the time travel machine existed. It's a fixed location.

Robot2600 posted...

Event Horizon just opens a portal to hell with its FTL drive.

There is a movie with the guy that played Robin, set in New Orleans, that uses the place you time travel and the place you end up as a plot point.

Looper?

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Event Horizon doesn't have time travel. The spaceship tried to achieve faster-than-light travel by folding space. It was comparable to fourth-dimension travel

Well, this is why it's called the Time And Relative Dimension In Space.

There is a book called Kindred, where a woman gets teleported back and forth between modern day and American Slavery times. At one point, she is teleported into a wall, losing her arm.

I guess this is why magic based time travel works (a bit) better?