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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[-] BeefPiano@lemmy.world 145 points 3 months ago

Time and space are the same thing, if you’re traveling in time it seems like you could travel in space at the same time.

[-] themeatbridge@lemmy.world 85 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Yeah but traveling in space takes time, so you can reason that traveling in time takes space.

[-] casmael@lemm.ee 41 points 3 months ago

Right so have we tried putting the Time Machine in the middle of a football field or smthn?

[-] captainjaneway@lemmy.world 24 points 3 months ago

Yes and that's how we ended up with American Football. In the original timeline, it never existed.

[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 15 points 3 months ago

how do i get to that timeline

[-] YoorWeb@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago

You have to turn left in 1867.

[-] variants@possumpat.io 9 points 3 months ago
[-] somethingsnappy@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

That's where you must have taken a wrong toin.

[-] MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

The goal posts and yard lines were all just decorative. People would come from miles away to sit and watch the field for 2 or 3 hours. Girls would do flips and shake pom-poms to encourage the grass to grow. Luckily the time traveler brought their egg ball with them and figured out something to do in these fields.

[-] Khanzarate@lemmy.world 12 points 3 months ago

Which is why the deLorean was an amazing time machine, obviously.

[-] walter_wiggles@lemmy.nz 16 points 3 months ago

So you're saying that, if you're traveling in space it seems like you could travel in time at the same space.

[-] GoodEye8@lemm.ee 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I think that's the joke. Media presents time travel as just inputting the date and off you go, but really you need to input time AND space because the two are interconnected.

Of course we could just imagine that all time machines somehow calculate the space itself just by knowing the current spacetime and the inputted time, but now we're giving writers too much benefit of doubt. In most cases time travel is used as plot device and very little thought is given to how it could work.

And an interesting sidenote. This also means that teleportation is a special case of time travel and if you've solved time travel you've probably also solved teleportation.

[-] Schadrach 3 points 3 months ago

Media presents time travel as just inputting the date and off you go, but really you need to input time AND space because the two are interconnected.

Alternately since we're Earthlings, someone designing a time machine might think it's a good idea to automatically calculate the location using the Earth as a reference point because that's likely to be the most common use case and doing so would prevent you from dying to the void of space if you make a tiny math error. At which point you would just need to input the destination time if the target is the same location relative to Earth.

[-] nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 months ago

Or maybe the time travel happens by warping space in the first place (since you need to somehow overcome the speed of light problems anyway). Seems like a good job for a wormhole if someone wanted to write around the space/time/motion rules.

[-] Schadrach 1 points 2 months ago

Wouldn't matter, because the problem isn't about space or motion, but about position. If you jump backwards in time but your position in the universe doesn't change then you are probably no longer on earth because the Earth moves about the sun, etc. To land somewhere meaningful, you'd have to calculate the target location relative to some reference point with a predictable location and as Earthlings we'd probably pick the Earth itself unless this is a time traveling spacecraft.

[-] jaybone@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

I teleport two Klingons every morning and I’m still late to the staff meeting.

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

If they were really the same thing, traveling into the past would be trivial. Greg Egan's Orthogonal series explores the consequences of space and time actually being the same thing. You can also the the difference in formulas related to proper time, where terms for space and time have opposite signs. Space and time have the same relationship to each other as real and imaginary numbers, in a fairly literal sense.

[-] pancakes@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 months ago

What is time, if not curvy space?

[-] Kowowow@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 months ago

Couldn't this be solved even if they weren't linked by just flickering in and out of phase or whatever to keep gravitationally relative with the earth

this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
1305 points (95.7% liked)

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