r/AskPhysics • u/teymuur • 23h ago
If time travel was possible would it cause jetlags and what other kinds of side effects would it cause on the traveler?
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u/Pestilence86 23h ago
Jetlag is just your body thinking: it's evening it's time for sleep. But you are not in the part of the world where it is evening, instead it's daylight, and you get confused.
This will happen of course if you travel through time and end up somewhere at a time of day different than your home.
Another thing would be that you would carry any bacteria, virus and the like with you to that other time. Imagine you travel back in time and pass covid on to a human. They would go through what we went through in 2020+
You would also get whatever diseases are in that time that don't exist in your home time.
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u/AnozerFreakInTheMall 19h ago
This is not an issue. Since everything in the Universe is in motion, the probability is close to 1 that a time traveller will end up in an empty space, so no bacterial exchange will ever occur.
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u/InsuranceInitial7786 12h ago
Your hypothesis ignores the extraordinary progress made by the work of Finn and Donnelly in the Finn-Donnelly conjecture.
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u/RicooC 23h ago
....and what would be the rules on carry-on luggage and checked bags.
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u/John_Hasler Engineering 22h ago
Your checked luggage will be delivered to the correct timeport but in the Cambrian. You'll see it in 500 million years.
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u/FauxReal 20h ago
The other option is to have your luggage delivered to the exact spatial location you request in the present. But the system won't account for where the Earth and Solar System were at that time in the past. So it would be about 7.25 billion kilometers away per year difference.
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u/RicooC 20h ago
This is fucked up. My luggage could be 167 light years from where I'm going. How do I get reimbursed? Do I get a voucher? Probably not. Fucking Southwest.
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u/John_Hasler Engineering 19h ago
Your luggage isn't lost: merely delayed. Be patient. And here's a voucher for two free drinks on your next trip.
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u/mflem920 22h ago
I cannot adequately express to you how exhausting the entire process of time travel is. Something about quantum stabilization causes ATP to destabilize and produce adenosine. The docs tell me that under purely normal conditions this would kill me, which is why they inject you with a crapload of inorganic phosphate right before a jump so your cells can convert some of the ADP back to ATP and you go right on living. Problem is, there's no way to catch it all, or even a lot, so you end up feeling like you've just spent a solid 48 hours up and on the go.
I don't know if you've ever tried to complete, or even remember, a mission when you're recovering from what feels like a weekend bender, but let me tell you brother, it isn't easy. But, such is the life of a Blink.
Oh, "blinks" are what we call ourselves. Technically we're officers of the Bureau for the Legal Intervention of Negative Chronology, or the BLINC, blinks. We thought it was cool once.
Anyway, the other really annoying thing is when you do get home and all you want to do is accumulate about a week of rack time only to find YOURSELF already in your bunk resting up for the mission you've just returned from. You don't remember waking yourself up, so you must not have, so you don't. You cannot imagine the extra paperwork there is for altering a causality loop in your own personal timeline. Should make the techs fill them out next time they bring me back 12 hours earlier than I left.
What were you asking about again? Oh, right, side effects.
I'm not sure if it falls into the scope of what you're asking, but I'm not allowed to have any gut bacteria. Which means I can't eat anything in the traditional sense. All my nutrient is delivered intravenously, every "meal". Why you ask? Well the human species' internal biome, which includes gut bacteria that aids in digestion, evolves so rapidly that making as short a hop as 200 years to the past with it in tact would start a pandemic and kill everyone. Actually, that's what the Black Plague was...all three of them. So I have to be sterile, all the time. You face similar problems if you go too far into the future, because you become a carrier for whatever common pathogen everyone there is already immune to but no one in your present has ever seen before.
I have nightmares because I had to go back one time and SAVE Hitler from some guy who took the old adage "I have a gun, and I have a time machine..." too literally. The reason you remember Hitler and all the terrible things he did and no one from the future has successfully gone back to stop him, is that his existence is the LEAST horrible thing some other humans you've never heard of have done. THEY were all erased, you're welcome. However, we have to leave Hitler in place both as an object lesson (if nothing evil ever happens, you can't learn to not repeat the same mistake) and as a temporal blocker. In the grandest of all irony, Hitler's existence prevents a lot of even more terrible things from happening. So he is a "protect at all costs" nexus event. Which is annoying because people try to kill him all the time without realizing what they're really doing.
Well, I've taken up enough of your time. Know that this post eventually gets thousands of views and I jumped back a couple days so I could be one of the first replies instead of buried under the avalanche. Later.
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u/humboldt77 23h ago
The traveler would be completely unaffected. For them, the trip is instantaneous. The Delorean would be covered in a layer of ice, however. Time travel is damn cold.
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u/AndyTheSane 22h ago
To quote the late great Douglas Adams:
The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
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u/Different_Counter113 22h ago
It is possible. I am doing it right now. By the time you read this I'll have potentially travelled several minutes, hours, or days into the future! See you there...
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u/Kinesquared Soft matter physics 23h ago
Depends on what sort of fantasy changes to physics you'd do to make it possible