Well, if we follow that logic, then where you end up is the emptiness of space, even if you go back exactly one year.
People tend to forget that the Earth not only goes around the sun, but the whole system is moving, so Earth is not in the same place as it was a year ago, even if it is relative to the sun.
Presumably all time travel devices, spells, etc. compensate for that. If someone figured out how to travel to the past, calculating where the planet was at the time should be easy by comparison.
Even more specifically, if we are talking a temporal teleport, then this shouldn’t be a surprise. Most mainstream fiction uses teleports for time travel, pop out of one time and into another without experiencing the time between. As opposed to the device Farnsworth made in The Late Philip J. Fry, where they actually just change speed through time instead of skipping through it. In the latter case, you shouldn’t have to worry about this issue at all. But with a teleport, any teleportation device is simultaneously a temporal and spatial teleport, due to causality and the nature of spacetime. So any teleport would need spacetime coordinates, not just spatial or temporal coordinates.
you can easily return to the past
but a tree used to be there where you are and now you’ve impaled it
Well, if we follow that logic, then where you end up is the emptiness of space, even if you go back exactly one year.
People tend to forget that the Earth not only goes around the sun, but the whole system is moving, so Earth is not in the same place as it was a year ago, even if it is relative to the sun.
Presumably all time travel devices, spells, etc. compensate for that. If someone figured out how to travel to the past, calculating where the planet was at the time should be easy by comparison.
Even more specifically, if we are talking a temporal teleport, then this shouldn’t be a surprise. Most mainstream fiction uses teleports for time travel, pop out of one time and into another without experiencing the time between. As opposed to the device Farnsworth made in The Late Philip J. Fry, where they actually just change speed through time instead of skipping through it. In the latter case, you shouldn’t have to worry about this issue at all. But with a teleport, any teleportation device is simultaneously a temporal and spatial teleport, due to causality and the nature of spacetime. So any teleport would need spacetime coordinates, not just spatial or temporal coordinates.
In the year 252525
The backwards time machine still won’t have arrived
In all the world, there’s only one technology
A rusty sword for practicing proctology