this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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Is there a piece of media that deals with the location issue properly? Always assumed that time travel would leave you in a "fixed" point in space and you'd need to accurately figure out where exactly you want to pop out
Once you get into real science where the Sun and Earth travel through space, either you have some sort of anchor device (meaning you can't go back before that anchor was made), or it's proper use of a black hole or some sort of singularity where things like lightspeed travel is already solved, and there's an established pair of terminus points.
One explanation could be that the time machine is anchored to the 🌞 gravity well, so it can find the position based on where the 🌞 is. In said setting, you're also limited to only traveling whole years.
That depends on the method of time travel, which is fictional anyway. Gravity is a wave and may be a particle as well, so the same as light. So, presumably, any method of traveling through time would travel through a medium outside of the known universe, meaning that gravity may not leak into that dimension.
Though, a good example would be the HG Wells Time Machine version of time travel, where the machine doesn't leave 3D space and simply scrolls through the time dimension, tied to (presumably) the Earth's gravity well.
If you based it on the Sun's gravity well, the Earth moves around the Sun at 30km a second. So what you really have is a great way to explore the solar system by placing yourself at points in time that create gravity slingshots to send you anywhere with no fuel. But you do need a spaceship. If you miscalculate the Earth's orbit by 1 second, you'd be at the edge of space or in the Earth's mantle so deep no one would ever find you, so the safest place to stop would be in orbit.
You can't define a "fixed" point in space without using something as reference. Might as well use the Earth.
The John Titor writers/hoaxers said that the Time Machine had two quantum singularities. They added the second one to lock the travel to earths gravitational field after their testing put the machines miles away
There is no "fixed" point in the universe. Everything is relative. A time-travel story that takes into account the motion solar system around the galaxy or somesuch is trying to be clever but actually fails science harder than the naive "same location on Earth" approach.