Advice for lost time travelers
Where and when did your time machine break?
This week’s rebroadcast involves a thought experiment from 2017 dealing with some essential questions for any character that finds themselves unstuck in time.
A few years ago, I worked on a Big Studio Movie that involved time travel. This particular project never made it off the launch pad, but it started me thinking about an admittedly minor issue with the genre:
How do time travelers know where and when they are?
For travelers with functional time machines, there is presumably some device onboard to calculate geographic and temporal location. Easy enough.
But what if the time machine breaks in transit? Or what if, like Kyle Reese in The Terminator, the voyager arrives in the past with no gear whatsoever?
Here’s the basic question that keeps me up some nights:
If I were deposited somewhere on Earth, somewhere in time, how could I figure out where and when I was?
Ask someone
Assuming there is a human civilization nearby, this seems like the obvious choice.
Odds are I wouldn’t speak their language, but I suspect that observing them would give me a general indication about where I was (Europe versus Asia versus Central America) and when (Paleolithic versus Iron Age). I’d want to be careful making assumptions based on ethnicity, since humans have moved around the globe a lot.
On the off chance I wasn’t immediately killed as an outsider, I’d eventually learn their language well enough to ask more detailed questions that could narrow things down further:
Which way is the ocean?
What other cultures have you encountered?
What’s the most impressive landmark, natural or otherwise, you can take me to?
Available clues
If there were no one else around, I’d have a much harder time even getting started figuring things out. But I wonder how much of that is my own ignorance.
Certainly, a competent biologist would be able to study the nearby plants and animals to get a sense of which ecosystem — and possibly what time period — they found themselves in.
Ditto for a paleontologist.
An experienced geographer or geologist would likely look for things I’d never considered, such as minerals in the soil or weather patterns.
A great astronomer might be able to use stars to figure stuff out. (My hunch is that celestial observation could help you determine where or when, but not both.)
An archeologist could likely glean useful information from abandoned settlements, even if the humans themselves weren’t around.
In general, these are situations where scientists have a considerable leg up on screenwriters, both because of the knowledge in their heads and their ability to apply the scientific method.
Phone a friend
Let’s say that through movie magic, I have a radio that lets me communicate with a trusted confidant in 2017. We’ll call her Trish.
Like a lost tourist, I might rely on Trish to Google things for me, or consult modern experts. Let’s assume she’s very resourceful and persuasive.
What would I ask her to do?
Who would I want her to call?
What might Trish tell me to do on my side to help determine where and when I was?
What’s interesting about Trish is that we all have one: the internet. It’s easy to forget that even ten or twenty years ago, it was much harder to find answers to many of our questions. We think of the internet as being a source of facts and opinions, but one of its most important functions is troubleshooting.
So that’s why I’m writing this blog post: to help solve my imaginary predicament. I’m genuinely curious how people smarter than me would solve this issue. What advice would you give to lost time travelers?
We’re leaving comments on this post open for the next few days. Inneresting readers, what novel suggestions can you come up with?
As a history major, I don't think that determining where and when I was would be much of a problem, at least once I got the language thing worked out.
The problem would be trying to send messages for help without giving yourself away.
Long ago Science Fiction determined that the best way to do that would be to sneak messages into time capsules, cornerstones of buildings, tombs, etc. Still it might be hard for your rescuers to locate you.
Then I saw this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrZghGJZP6M and realized that you could just go to the market in a large city and be a "busker", play songs like this on ancient instruments. The locals won't recognize it, but anyone from almost any era that has time travel will recognize that, and approach you.
I guess another question is, how important is it to the character to actually know the time and place? Depends on your story, and why this person has time travelled. If you go in blind, with no chance to prepare, and there is nobody nearby, the more important skills are probably basic survival skills - can you live off the land, defend yourself, find shelter, etc. The time period is kind of irrelevant unless you encounter other people.
The stars could be useful for general information about latitude and time of year, but unless you're travelling many thousands of years, its unlikely they will be useful for determining how far back you've travelled, even if you know what to look for. One key indicator could be recorded supernovas, but that's kinda like throwing a dart into a stack of hay and hitting the proverbial needle. And it would require prior knowledge of those events.
Asking Google/a friend could help with astronomical information, possibly with flora/fauna as well, although the further back you travel, the more likely any species you encounter is not one we have a record of.
A tool you could use, if you had enough knowledge, would be setting up a "sundial" of sorts. Even if you don't have an accurate timepiece, you can record the angle and length of the shadow at dawn and dusk and estimate the latitude/time of year. Combined with some astronomical observations, that would help with the "where" question.
While you've got Google on the line, figuring out the fairly precise location of all the planets would narrow down the options for when. Given knowledge of the orbital times and locations in present day, you could calculate a fairly limited set of possibilities for where all the planets are relative to Earth at that given time of year. A couple of observations would give you several but not all of the planets, but the more you observe over time would reduce the options that match by adding more planets to the list.