#do not forget in the archives
Had a sudden idea, writing it here so I don’t forget it. Has very little to do with my usual interests.
So, time machines are impossible. As far as we know, time and space are very interconnected and not very flexible. Wormholes and black holes notwithstanding, because they’ll probably kill anyone who enters them. One cannot travel through space without traveling through time, and vice versa. You take a step forward and a moment has passed, however you measure it. You try to stay perfectly still, but that’s impossible. Even if you freeze all of your cells, the electrons on your atoms will spin, spin, spin. The laws of our reality are (seemingly) unbendable. How do we see dinosaurs?
We don’t travel through time, we travel through universes. [Realizing after I wrote all this that that new Professor Peculiar movie just came out… This has nothing to do with that, I was just thinking about time machines]
Proposition takes into account a few things that are sci-fi world-building-y, but so do all time travel stories. The first is the theory of parallel universes. Imagine a universe as an island. Within the confines of that island there are all the laws that govern it, including time and space. An infinite number of islands exist, laid out in a sort of grid. What is between the islands? A sea, or, an inter-universal space. A place where there is no time or space or any other sort of physical law. This inter-universal space (hereafter shortened to IUS) is our ticket.
In the IUS, we can, hopefully, travel to a parallel universe that is exactly the same, except for one detail: the timing of the big bang. We want to travel to the Cretaceous period? Travel to a universe where the universe started 67 million years after ours (add an extra million years, just to be safe. If we travel through the IUS, there should be no time or space. So, when we leave our own universe’s confines, no time will pass and we can travel any distance, because there is no such thing as distance.
Problem: we need time and space and all those other laws of physics to live. We might not die, but it would be nice to keep our molecules existing as we know they ought to be. This is where our “time” machine comes into play.
There are two components: one set that exists in our universe, and one that exists either entirely in the IUS or on the boundary of our universe and the IUS. The one in our universe will be where the crew and all that stuff should be. For the purposes of my own imagination, I imagine it like a bathysphere the size of a research station. The shape doesn’t really matter though, because of the second part.
In the IUS our true technology exists. This will be an outer “shell” that covers the first component and has all the important jobs. How will it do these jobs? How will it be constructed? How does it work? Well, the IUS doesn’t have any laws of physics or anything, so making a machine that can do all of these things shouldn’t be all that hard. Its jobs are as follows:
Create a miniature universe for the crew and research station to inhabit. This allows them to exist without dissolving into nothingness. It should have a slightly tweaked set of rules though. Perhaps time and space exist, but they are frozen in place. That way the crew doesn’t have to experience anything in the IUS and will just experience a tiny “jump” as they enter the target universe.
Travel through the IUS to locate the target universe. There really isn’t a medium through which to travel, and considering there’s no laws for propulsion or anything, this should be simple. All it needs is a universe that matches our specifications.
Enter us out of our universe and into the target one. This is a bit finicky. You see, our planet, our solar system, and pretty much everything is constantly hurtling through what we call space. Which is why every time machine needs to be a space and time machine. If we just traveled through time, we’d end up in the location our planet was 67 million years ago. For all we know, this could be inside a star or, more likely, in the vast nothingness of space, waiting for our solar system to swing by in another few million years. We need our machine to plop us at the right coordinates. Secondly, we need to make sure our landing is safe. When we leave our universe, all of the space where the machine was before becomes a vacuum, as there isn’t anything there anymore. Gas will rush into to fill it. The opposite happens in our target universe. We will be placed into an area where there will already by atoms. When we enter, all of the atoms in the place we pop into will be violently moved out of the way, because they don’t want to overlap with us. This will produce an explosion. It would be preferable to have a gas explosion rather than an explosion of, say, rocks, or tree, or dinosaur. We could make the research station secondarily enclosed in a rocket-ship, but those things are expensive and dangerous. We’re already sending a crew to another universe, why risk a rocket fuel explosion?
When we get to the target universe, the crew and everything they bring will be subjected to the new laws of physics, so time will pass. Similarly, time will pass in our universe. Though we’ve left it and travelled through the IUS, it is still doing its thing. No time passes in the IUS, but, if the laws of physics are the same in the target, the same amount of time passing in that one should match our own.
And then bam! Dinosaurs.
The ethical questions surrounding this are, uh, complicated. We don’t have the risk of paradoxes, since this is a different universe from ours, but we will be changing the course of events on the target universe’s Earth. Will that be fair? But, again going back to parallel universe theory, someone else has probably already done it. Have they done it to our universe already?
Idk. I’m not a philosopher. Or a physicist, if that wasn’t clear already.
Very scientific diagram to illustrate my idea:
