nobody at work wants to answer this

Sep 02, 2011 11:15

1. The earth is constantly moving around the sun, so if you stayed the same exact place in the solar system from one day to the next, the earth would have left you behind ( Read more... )

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sildra September 2 2011, 15:56:05 UTC
Maybe.

(Technically it isn't 0K, though. Technically it isn't even 0psi, although close enough. But intergalactic space is at nearly 3K, due to all the microwaves bouncing around left over from when the universe started to solidify into stars, and you'd have to travel pretty far, time-wise, for the entire galaxy to pass you by; galactic space is warmer still, due to radiation from nearby-ish stars.)

The complication is that spacetime kind of... sticks to massive objects. "Time travel" isn't really a well-defined thing--in that no one's every come up with a plausible mechanism for it--and given that it's poorly defined, it's hard to discuss it without discussing what mechanism we'd use. It's entirely plausible that that mechanism would still keep us in some way stuck in the Earth's or the Sun's gravitational well; it's also plausible that that mechanism would send us hurtling through space and leave us who-knows-where.

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sbeath September 3 2011, 02:47:31 UTC
So, it could theoretically be sort of okay. That's fascinating! So, is that why atomic clocks go faster or slower when you change elevation, or is that something else?

I should really have stipulated intentional atypical time travel, since (I think) we're all technically time travelling as we speak.

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sildra September 3 2011, 03:42:54 UTC
Well, more like I can't say anything about how it would theoretically turn out without knowing how we're doing this, although as crystalpyramid points out below it's likely that something that could travel through time could just as easily travel through space anyway. I guess, without doing the calculations and just going by intuition, it's possible that going backwards in time would make gravity repulsive, while going forwards would make it stronger ( ... )

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crystalpyramid September 2 2011, 16:43:33 UTC
They don't even take into consideration the rotation of the earth, which I imagine would cause a fair number of drowning deaths on its own. Time travel without asphyxiation must be even more complicated than one would think. Although given the whole spacetime continuum thing, any time-travel device that didn't double as a teleporter would be somewhat suspect.

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sbeath September 3 2011, 03:03:07 UTC
Time travel without asphyxiation must be even more complicated than one would think.

Yeah--when you time travel into a rock, do you asphyxiate, or do you just become crushed?

Although given the whole spacetime continuum thing, any time-travel device that didn't double as a teleporter would be somewhat suspect.

So, essentially, anyway you slice this not-actual thing, you probably end up dead when you do it.

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crystalpyramid September 3 2011, 03:11:45 UTC
Thank you for finding me a comic that NEEDS TO GO ON MY DOOR.

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