Unexplained Science

Sci-Fi Deak Style by John Deakins

There’s another approach to Time Travel that creates space travel instead. Your Unexplained Science involves a device that moves in Time, separately from moving in Space. The Earth, however, is in constant high-velocity motion in Space. Thus, when you activate your machine, you’ll leave Earth behind and end up in the Great Vacuum . . . which is exactly what you want.

Once you get away from Earth’s gravity well, escape velocity drops off by the inverse square law. If you allow the Earth to move out from under you on its own journey by 50,000 km, its pull becomes negligible. You’ve just created cheap interplanetary flight. Instead of kinetic launching, which currently costs $2 million/kg, you’ll expend only the energy to run your time machine.

Stories in Martian or Asteroid conclaves have always depended on Ignore It or Unexplained Science. It’d destroy most economies to send out more than a handful of people. The enormous flight times are also a problem. We can’t sustain a closed ecosystem for the time required. A conservative guess for Mars is two years, one way. You’ve just created a way to cut travel time to months instead.

Good news: The Solar System as a whole, including you, has the same relative velocity in terms of the galaxy and the cosmos. Popping off Earth only enough to ignore its gravity won’t leave you hopelessly between stars, unless you try to go too far. All you wanted was off Earth, and you’re there!

Space is bigger than anyone really appreciates. You can send out repeated flights, and never have to worry about Flight 2 materializing inside Flight 1. By the time Flight 2 launches, the whole Solar System will have moved thousands kilometers in its orbit around the Milky Way center: You’ll be in pristine vacuum.

You’ll have to spend a lot of computer time calculating how “far” to move temporally, so that you take advantage of the sling-shot effects of the Earth’s rotation and revolution. You’ll want whatever help Conservation of Momentum can give. Space travel will still be expensive. Going to Mars? Let the Earth’s motions help throw you in the right direction, but leave its gravity behind.

We’ve solved all the problems: Right? The technology of move-in-Time/move-in-Space has to be kept Top, Top Secret. Sure, you’re going to launch your Mars expedition by popping your craft, say, five minutes backwards in Time and pushing off toward Mars, sans gravity. What happens if you only move, say, a tenth of a second?

Your device could end up inside the Earth’s crust. Its atoms and the crustal atoms would fuse; you’d generate a neat, homemade nuclear explosion. A terrorist could simply set up under New York, send a few pounds of rocks a fraction of a second in Time, and New York would rain down over the Eastern Seaboard. Retaliation could lead to Nuclear Winter and the extinction of Homo sapiens.

Children, be careful with your toys: more problems next time.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom now retired and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.