Time Travel Reference Frames

[The Mad Monk]

Thanks for the offer, but it was a fine fit of anger and I'd rather keep the monument.

[giblets]

Why is there no time travel in Star Wars?

[Lorizael]

Why is there no time travel in Star Wars?

There is, but it's been erased from the timeline.

[The Mad Monk]

Feel free to erase post #30 from the timeline.

[Jon Miller]

I always wanted to play a 'Traveller' game. I own a little bit of DnD (most of what I have played), a LOTR book and some Traveller.

JM

[Lorizael]

Oh crap a real physicist.

[giblets]

What happened to Krazyhorse? He could tell us time travel doesn't exist because markets blah blah blah

[The Mad Monk]

Oh crap a real physicist.

Even better, a real physicist who likes TRAVELLER!

[Lorizael]

Traveller was a little before my time, or just not what my group ever got into. I wish we did more SF role-playing.

[Lorizael]

There's a time-travel RPG out there called Continuum that I wish I could get my group to play.

[The Mad Monk]

Never heard of continuum. I think.

[Lorizael]

Well, I think it was written and published by, basically, some dudes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(role-playing_game)

[The Mad Monk]

I thought it might be related to Time Master, but apparently not.

[Ben Kenobi]

Neither of these forms of time travel resemble the classic science fiction idea of a time machine, however. If you pop out of existence at time t and pop back into existence at t-1000, is it at all clear where you should be spatially?

All tough, tough questions. The problem of displacement is not an easy one to solve. There are two solutions - the less fun one which states that you have a time 'viewer', that enables you to travel through time, such that you can see things back in time. It solves the causality issues, but leaves you stuck with the spatial issues. How do you travel when you're 'out of phase' so to speak? You can't just 'walk around', because that would entail contact with the things you can't come into contact with. How would you eat?

The only other way I can see is the science fiction story I ended up writing called the 'long way home'. What I did was have a 'time machine builder construct his time machine in a sealed pod. The pod was in a vacuum with it's precise geospationary coordinates recorded. It's easy enough for a computer to compute spacetime transformations of that set of coordinates. The machine was powered with a small reactor. It would disintegrate the user and depending on the energy stored, would determine how far it could teleport you through spacetime and then reassemble you back at the beginning. It would require an amazingly large computer to store the atomic contents of the body as well as their precise location and arrangement. Sort of a souped up teleporter, but with the sealed ingress.

Then the time machine builder could go back to the instant he first built the machine. The paradox being that he could never travel further back in the past than to his time machine with it's precise coordinates. It would also prevent the causality issues surrounding changing events preventing him from building the time machine, etc.

To solve the spatial issues - just park a car next to your time pod. The restrictions made for an interesting story because it meant you didn't have to worry about things like where the time pod was located, but you *did* have to worry about concealing the building and things like that.

The story began with his time pod malfunctioning, sending him way back into the past and writing about THAT end of time travel, what his life was like on the other end.