Episode 96: To Utopia and Beyond!
All time travel is also space travel. What if one wanted to go to the spot they are standing on six months from now? Some sort of correction has to take place to account for the earth's rotation around the sun. And that doesn't even factor in the galactic rotation or peculiar motion of the Milky Way.
So, I figured that time travel would also have some built in "inertial dampening" to account for the fact that if a person was suddenly moved from a certain place in January to that same place in July, the change in forces acting on the person might end up in them getting squished.
It was on the basis of this logic that I figured that Frederick and Newton could get away with teleporting away from high-velocity death in this episode.
I'm not actually sure that this reasoning is correct. If a fly was buzzing around in a car that was moving at 60 MPH, and then the fly was somehow teleported out of that reference frame (to a calm field or somewhere otherwise neutral), what forces would be acting on the fly? Would it find itself suddenly moving at 60MPH? My skills in physics are inadequate for this task. Maybe the Count has some idea?
Anyway, it is a lot of wasted brain power to get to the same result. For our purposes, time travel holds up a big middle finger to the law of conservation of momentum.
The Power of Time probably just slurps up the excess as an aperitif.
Also, I wouldn't worry too much about Peter. He is, more or less, the only one of our merry band that could survive a fall from a great height off a rocket train. Actually, come to think of it, that does sound pretty bad...
--Geoff
Historically, Peter died an incredibly painful death after a long stretch of on-again, off-again health. Had he delegated any work, he might have bought himself more time, but experience had taught him that only by handling everything himself would anything get done, and so he continued working and fretting and prodding himself into the grave until finally he died of GANGRENE of the BLADDER. Read that again... GANGRENE in his BLADDER.
Unpleasant.
Now, to take your mind off gangrenous bladders, go look at a barber shop performing the Ewok Yub Nub song.
- Count Dolby von Luckner
