this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Yes! Thank you. Lots of time travellers lost in the void or buried in solid objects.
Some possible ways of dealing with this:
The time travel device does the complicated math to get the time and position correct, assuming the SF writer only wants to deal with 4 dimensions.
Tunneling effect so that it's a straight point to point between the two timelines.
Get Weird. Invoke quantum entanglement to rearrange the exact same atoms that make up the time travellers' bodies in the destination timeline, because mass/energy can never be created, only borrowed, and perhaps the universe has a conservation of mass/energy rules and can't add more mass/energy from a foreign timeline without tipping the balance from a "Big Rip" end of the universe event to a "Big Crunch" event.
My favorite patch (other than "what frame of reference are you using for this and why that one in particular, none of them are more correct than any other") is to just say gravity continues to affect you even as you're traveling in time, effectively holding you in the same place if you're on a planet or in orbit.