OVER LOOKED TIME TRAVEL FACTS
Copyright 2000-2009 George D. Peterson, Jr.

TIME/SPACE
Too many of the people that believe that time travel is possible overlook a very important aspect of time travel.  Jules Vern (star of Vern Goes to Camp, Vern Saves the Day, Vern Gets Rich, etc) moved his time machine from his lab into the garden to go back behind the cave entry to see his futuristic girl friend.

I have some bad news for you.  Time travel is depicted as being relative to our current position in space.  The place we are at, right now, is moving. At the equator, your velocity is about 1,000 miles per hour because the earth rotates every 24 hours.

So if I were to travel back in time one hour, would I "appear" here in good old Mobile, Alabama?  Not hardly.  Since the surface of the earth is traveling in an eastward direction, then I would find myself not only one hour back in time but also one hour away in distance which would quite possibly put me in the Atlantic ocean.

OK, you say, that is cool, just travel back one day.  Yes, and it'd have to be a precise day now, wouldn't it? Even a few seconds (by the way, a day is not exactly 24 hours) may cause me to "appear" a few feet east or west. That would solve the location problem, although not as convenient, right? Naw!  

Guess what, the earth is orbiting the sun at about 3 million miles an hour.  So, if you go back in time 24 hours, then you will be appearing in the cold vacuum of space, with the earth on a collision course, destined to strike you in 24 hours at 3 million mph. 

(Advanced Scientific question #21:  Does an object undergoing time travel retain the momentum or velocity it possessed when it began its journey?  Would the 24-hour time traveler be stationary or be hurled of in a tangent at 3 million miles per hour when it arrived at its destination?)

So you try to solve that problem by going back a year (and yes, a year is not exactly 365 days), but the same thing happens again, the galaxy we are currently living in (spiraling into its center, doomed, one and all) is also swirling about. Even if you were able to compensate for that, the universe is currently expanding, so you would absolutely lose your ability to even consider compensating for these physical displacements by rotation compensation (that is a new term I have derived, surely destined to be come a common phrase in future astrophysics books).

So, your craft would not only need to travel in time but also have the precise navigational abilities and propellant to carry it to the exact location in time and in space.  And did you consider that acquired momentum?  And is there always a 'direct' route?

UNDETERMINED LANDING ENVIRONMENT
And what about your "landing" site?  Suppose you were able to compensate for the location in the universe and 'appear' precisely at a location in time.  Are you certain what would be there at that location, exactly?  

If we went back hundreds of years, would we appear inside a dense forest? Would it be inside the ocean or a sheet of ice?  How would 'appearing' at a precise location, that a million years ago, was solid ice, affect your physical make up and the device you were traveling in?  What if the water level was much higher than now - you would 'appear' under water. Maybe in a nice warm lava pool. Maybe 10 meters above the surface.  

The problem is that we have no idea of what the landing environment may be or even was, the farther we displace time from the present in any direction.

DIRECT ROUTE
When you drive down town, do you travel in a straight line?  No, there are trees, homes, hills, lakes, etc between you and your destination.  If you were traveling from here to Saturn conventionally, you'd certainly want to dodge any meteors, comets, asteroids, and orbital rings.

If I were to go back or ahead a half a year, the direct route would be through the sun. If time travel does  indeed involve some form of navigation to get from one time (and spatial location) to another, then is it also possible that physical objects need to be dodged?  Well, you'd better figure that out before you click on the go button.

IS TIME TRAVEL REALLY POSSIBLE?
I don't think so. If so, we'd be seeing visitors and the future would be changing constantly as the past.  It will not be nicey-nice like you see on TV where everyone pays attention to the time line. There would be some people (and it'd only take one) coming back for selfish reasons, that will affect all of us no matter how many Time Cops there were! Maybe we don't know it, though.  

There are suppose to be an infinite number of time lines each, though, starting at every precise moment of time, which itself is infinitely large AND small.  There is only one outcome for any event once it has taken place.  There could be up to an infinite number of outcomes before the event, however.  Each event can affect an infinite number of future events.  (This part is not rocket science.)

If there are an infinite number of time lines, then going back and changing an event will do you no benefit if you are not able to then go back to the time line that follows that event. And who is to say that, that time line could not have also been altered from your original time line?  What was that TV show, where they traveled between parallel universes finding things much different yet being in the same time and space? 

You won't win. You have to navigate time, space, and then ... what exactly is a time line? Does it exist in the same space? It should. So, if we had an infinite number of universes popping up every infinitesimal fraction of a second, we'd have a serious real estate problem in a few microseconds.

CONSEQUENCES
Consider just one incident in time. Consider that the inventor of the time machine was a devoted Christian. For the first journey, the traveler wants to see the resurrection of Christ.  The traveler then learns that the entire thing was a fake.  Jesus Christ is the basis of many societies, even countries - what would that single trip back in time do for every Christian on the planet?  Although time was NOT altered, the results of the information learned on the journey would be devastating to many people and alter the future.

Everyone knows the one where you go back and meet your own mother before you she meets your dad.  Your mom and dad don't get married because of something that you caused to happen  So you don't exist, so that whatever you did could not have happened, so they must have gotten married or not?

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