Pseudo-Science

The Real Problem With Time Travel

Location Location Location

The author with two flappers, approximately 100 years ago.

Have you done a lot of time traveling? Do you have a friend who has? Maybe you have seen movies in which people travel through time? You move through long periods of time and arrive on that same street that you just left, right? Ha! Maybe you didn’t realize how far you had to travel through space to get to that exact same pothole in the road.

Everything is moving. Always. The Earth is rotating on its axis at up to 1000 MPH, depending on your latitude. When you disconnect from the time/space continuum, just finding your living room one minute ago is a huge calculus problem of distance, direction, altitude, and orientation. Then you probably have to factor in the Earth’s path around the sun, at an average (but not constant) speed of about 66,620 MPH, the tilt of the Earth’s axis at about 23 degrees, and the elliptical, non-concentric path of the orbit. Not to mention the path of the solar system through the galaxy and the movement of the galaxy relative to the moving center of the universe. Try plugging all that into the calculator on your iPhone.

If you want to travel back to the time of the dinosaurs, you will need to travel a good long distance through space as well as through time to get there. The slightest miscalculation will have you…