Time Travel Spoiler

I was watching the sitcom ' The Big Bang Theory' when Amy spoilt the 'Raiders of the lost Ark' movie by pointing out to Sheldon that the part of the hero, Indiana Jones, was completely unnecessary to the plot of the film. Sheldon gets his revenge by showing Amy the inconsistencies in 'The Little House on The Prairie'. When you look at other movies and television you can see all sorts of glaring scientific or factual errors.

Have you noticed that in many if not most of the movies on time travel the movie expects the time traveller to end up in the same place but at a different time in the future or past. This is shown most emphatically in the 'Back To The Future' series and in 'The Time Machine'.

There is a little educational website called 'The Universe In The Classroom' which posed the question 'How Fast Are You Moving When You Are Sitting Still?'.  Now this shows all of the movement that the Earth is subject to in great detail. If we just look at the speed at which the Earth travels around the galaxy it is ~483,000 miles per hour (792,000 km/hr) that is 8050 miles (13,200 km) in a minute.

This means that just travelling in time a time traveller is going to end up somewhere in space, ie where the Earth used to be, not the place the traveller started from. The traveller should wear a good quality space suit.

This means that a time traveller not only has to travel in time but also has to travel to the exact coordinates in space where the earth is going to be at the time wanted. When you look at the factors that have to be taken into consideration it does not seem achievable.

This has nothing to do with the spacetime continuum theory by the way.

Any chance that the 'Back To The Future' locomotive steaming along a track and ending up on the same track in the past is about remote as my becoming a whale tomorrow.

Don't let facts spoil a good story or movie though.

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