Time Travel While Dodging Bullets

I am an extreme commuter, driving eighty miles to work, eighty miles each way that is. I leave my house well before daylight and drive for an hour and a half in the dark. At the height of summer I reach work just as day breaks, but usually it is still dark as I arrive. Sometimes I listen to the radio but mostly I just listen to my own wheels turning. This is a set up conducive to some weird trains of thought. Recently when we had to change the clocks it started me thinking about time.....

Journal entry 1.167.a:

Driving in to work this morning I was thinking that if the speed of light really is inviolate, and if UFOs really do exist, then the UFOs have to be time travelers. This is not a new concept of course, but it did start me down another train of thought....

How would that work with the multiple spatial/geometrical movements of the universe? Let's say you had a time travel machine in your living room. Using XYZ coordinates you could pin point it's location in space, or could you? The earth is spinning on its axis and circling around the sun and spiraling around inside the milky way with the rest of our solar system and simultaneously traveling across space at 1,000 miles per second with our galaxy. That's a lot of spiraling and gyrating across space at high speeds.

In order to time travel you would also have to travel spatially to a predicted position in space where the living room had been if you were going backwards, or would be if you were time traveling forwards. The further out in time you had to predict that exact spot the less accurate you would be. Compounding this is the fact that there isn't a single fixed position in the universe to work from - everything is moving all the time and in different directions.

Then add to that the fact that all of the movements are changing in size and shape and speed in random ways; for instance the earths rotation about it's axis is only predictable to a few micro seconds because things like volcanic eruptions and earth quakes cause random changes in it. In order to make a prediction where the living room would be in 24 hours, or was 24 hours previously, you would have to calculate based on so many variables that only a super computer would have a chance, an ever decreasing chance with longer time intervals.

One tiny little variation caused by an unexpected earth quake or a slight variation in the gravitational force caused by an asteroid being a half mile closer than expected and BOOM; before you could even say it you could end up inside the earths core or way out in frozen space. The odds of actually ending up in that living room are worse than the odds of riding on a roller coaster and trying to deliberately fire a gun and hit a bullet fired by someone else riding on another roller coaster who had fired a gun in a random direction at a random time.

Not only that, but you would have to build a machine that could travel geometrically at the same time as traveling through time. But it gets worse because somewhere enroute you would have to consider the possibility of traveling through an object while traveling through time and space, both. You not only have to predict where to be, but be able to predict a path to it that wouldn't cause you to run into anything else along the way. So if you go back to the roller coaster analogy you have to add in that you are also ducking bullets being fired at you from a fixed position by an expert marksman.

But if UFOs actually exist and if they are actually time travelers, how do they work that out? You build a space ship that can time travel. You spatially fly way out into empty space in the general area of where you want to be when you come out of the time travel, do your time travel and fly spatially over to your destination. Kind of like taking a city bus - you don't leave and arrive from/to exact positions, you walk to the bus stop, take the bus and then walk to your final destination. Your predictive accuracy doesn't have to be nearly as accurate that way because you are using empty space instead of a crowded galaxy. You can also take short hops across time, making it safer because you can take bearings along the way and adjust. Perhaps the UFOs we see are time travelers on the hop to somewhen else that have stopped off to use their sextants.

That could explain why UFOs appear to come from space, yet don't violate the limitation of the speed of light.

About the time I came to that conclusion I had arrived at work and had to dock my terrestrial spatial travel machine into the parking garage while it was spiraling through space in six different directions at once.

This time change is hell.