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.

TIME TRAVEL

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Fictional Time Travel is so universal that every SF writer feels obliged to write a Time Travel story. “Our heroine’s time machine leaves 2013 Chicago and emerges in . . .” 1913 Chicago, future Chicago, Jurassic Chicago, Native American Chicago; etc. What wonderful possibilities! Unfortunately, Time Travel carries the worst scientific flaws of any major SF idea.

We live in an Einsteinian universe. Newton’s laws also work pretty well. Time Travel requires a Ptolemaic, geocentric universe, of which this ain’t one.

If you travel in Time from a particular spatial location, you should emerge in that same location: Right? As the Earth rotates, Chicago is rolling eastward at 1600 km/hr. In the next second, your position will separate from your original by over 400 meters. Five minutes in Time is over 130 kilometers in space. The spinning Earth just won’t hold still!

Unless you repeal Conservation of Momentum, when you arrive with a twelve clock-hours difference than the time of day you left, you’ll exit onto an Earth in which everything on the rotational counter-side will be slamming into you at 3200 km/hr.

Just make sure that you travel exactly multiples of one day. Chicago will have rotated to the same spot . . . except that the Earth is revolving around the Sun at 30 km/sec more. Five minutes is almost 9000 km away. Even a quick jaunt leaves you breathing vacuum.

Don’t forget the Sun’s orbit around the Milky Way’s core (Add hundreds of km/hr more.) and the motion of the galaxy relative to the space-time continuum. Unless your time machine is also a sealed space craft, you won’t survive to appreciate just how much airless space the universe contains.

What about reentry? When you reach a new space-time locus, will you simply push the air aside as you expand from an infinitesimally small point? That would produce a whopper of a thunderclap. Arriving secretly would be impossible. If your machine were too flimsy, the rebounding shock wave would crush it.

Will you and the local molecules simply become one? Writers agree that arriving inside a solid, regardless of method, would be a poor survival idea. With untold trillions of molecules present, some of yours would arrive inside other molecules. You might blow up like a balloon, or simply blow up. If your atomic nuclei appeared in the same space as local atomic nuclei, and the strong nuclear force would fuse them, with fatal radiation and energy release. Nuclei that were close, but not close enough, would be repelled at particle-collider speeds. You’d create thousands of fast particles that would shred your cells like a radioactive shotgun blast.

We don’t want to give up Time Travel, but what can be done? You can always Ignore It. Your readers are also geocentric. They won’t notice that you can’t travel from now-Chicago to then-Chicago without cheating on the universe’s rules. Have fun.

That’s a solution? We’re Science fiction purists. There has to be a better way. More next time.

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

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