What if time travel had to take into account spatial distance?
In this setting, humanity has advanced to the technological capability of extra stellar travel via faster-than-light drives. However, due to distances between inhabited areas being extremely large, travel between two systems is still very, very slow and resource intensive, taking years at a time (As light is known to do already).
As a result, technology was developed to effectively "tunnel" through space-time as a wormhole theoretically does in order to facilitate travel, and this effectively allows four-dimensional travel. What if the wormhole functioned on an entirely vector-based system, where the entry point and exit points must take into account spatial distance? For instance, if a traveler from Earth entered the wormhole and only traveled time (not space), he would end up in the exact same space as he left, just at a different point in time, meaning that the Earth would not be at the wormhole exit, it would not have arrived yet.
I could see that there would be a huge drive to map true planetary motion, complete with the development of a system to map locations in four dimensions, perhaps continuing on into the past so far as to map objects back to the big bang and expansion of space-time, a true final frontier.
Let's assume that creating wormholes is extremely energy intensive, and construction of a tunnel requires enormous feats of engineering and resources to the point where only one tunneling device exists for the time being and the actual opening is 25 m3 that travels with the space-time velocity of the device (meaning that the device must compensate for its own travel if it needs to exist in a specific point in space).
What potential for abuse does this system have? What methods might a government take to keep order? How might scientists attempt to study paradoxical behavior (If it even exists)? What other applications might this technology have (especially for historians and explorer types)? What might a universal reference point be for the device that is not mechanically determined?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1464. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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As Neil pointed out, there is no absolute frame of reference, so I'll pretend that the frame of reference is relative to something - in some scenarios, the Sun; in others, the Earth, and in others, the center of the Milky Way.
What potential for abuse does this situation have?
Well, there's always the old 'execution-by-pushing-a-person-into-outer-space-so-s/he-dies-from-suffocation-and-heating/freezing' approach. You simply calculate at what point in time there will not be an Earth in that position, and push the person in.
For those who are horrified at the idea, I'll say that this system has the potential for some great advances in bringing things from one place to another. Say you have a lot of toxic waste, or spent nuclear fuel. Simply calculate the time at which that point in space will be filled by, say, a star, and push all the unwanted material in. Foom! - all the waste is gone. Quite the handy-dandy kitchen appliance.
In all seriousness, though, the effects of this system depend on how many people have access to it. If anyone in power thinks of the execution method I described above, they would instantly make a push for strict regulation of the devices. We'll confine that to Area 51, thank you very much. Honestly, government regulation depends on just who came up with the idea. If it's a relatively secret (i.e. classified DoD or MI5) government project, its very existence will be most likely hushed up. If it's a defense contractor, or a private company, word could spread. And if some guy/girl came up with it in his/her backyard, we're in trouble.
On to paradoxes. There are plenty: the grandfather paradox, the killing-the-inventor paradox, and the becoming-your-own-mother-or-father paradox. These are all fairly big problems in science, as they throw causality out the window. The only hope is that traveling in time fulfills what has already (or what will already) happen. The other hope is that of the multiverse (where each universe splits upon each decision, and if you kill your grandfather this all happens in another universe), but that's highly, highly speculative. So scientists would love to study the paradoxes.
Other applications. Hmm. Tricky. Well, not really, but hard to narrow it down. You could travel in time to test theories, take tours of famous places and meet famous people, and really do anything you want. However, there is a limit to what you could do. If the reference point is the Sun, you could only travel back in time in multiples of one year. Of course, all you'd have to do to travel to another point in time is to go back a bit further and wait it out, but that's a bit boring. Unless you're sipping pina coladas with Julius Caesar.
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