oh no, thats the whole point- they did not find a drive to take them back to earth- they found a time machine to travel backwards in time but NOT travel through space...
This highlights a seldom discussed problem with time travel in general ... The Earth is orbiting the Sun. The solar system is orbiting the core of the galaxy. Our galaxy is moving relative to other galaxies in the universe. If you travel back in time an hour, a year, a century, etc., you'll end up in deep space.
Either that, or if they acquire reliable suspended animation technology, they can go back in time three million years, set the ship on course for Earth, and go into suspended animation, so that they arrive back on Earth shortly after they originally left (best not to arrive before they left, depending on the effect of paradox in the universe of Red Dwarf).
well they are currently 3 million years distant from earth, so theyll have to go 6 million years into the past and travel 3 million years in suspended animation to get back to earth in their relative present, unless they want to arrive on 3million AD earth. That also ignores and expansion of space or travel of the solar system in the milky ways as it orbits the galactic centre around every 200million years.
@@IronicSonics I see your point. Actually the series doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of time and distance. In the first season, Dave Lister is the last surviving human because his mining ship had a radiation leak while he was in the stasis brig (basically gives the person a time-out as punishment . . . they aren't using up air, water and food sitting in the brig, they just don't get paid for the time they're in stasis). The ship wakes him up three million years later when the radiation is at safe levels. In the meantime, the human species has become extinct. They're not any particularly remote distance from Earth, it's the time that has passed that is the issue. In the second seaason, they're somehow also "three million years from Earth," and it's treated like it's a distance (like light years) or a travel time (like "it would take three million years to get there at the best speed we can maintain"). If those are both true, then they're three million years travel from Earth and three million years in Lister's future, so to get to a time before his family and friends (assuming he had any of either around) are all dead, he'd need to go back six million years as you described.
@@woodrobin It's all being done for "Teh LOLZ" so we're not really supposed to think *that* deeply about how they could really fix their overall dilemma.
Or they could travel at the speed so close to light that for them its minutes or hours (the faster you go the slower time passes for you) untill they arrive at earth and then they use the timemachine to go back in the past
I think the major overlooked aspect of the time drive was as a defensive tool Something nasty coming to you outside the ship - jump back a few years, you are still in the same place but whatever it was is now gone, either because it hasn't arrived yet - or if it's a "fixed position" i.e. celestial body / station / anomaly etc. it would be millions of miles away due to galactic rotation.
And then in series 7 this whole joke is made redundant when they DO use the time drive to go back to Earth, to make sure Lister can be found under the pool table
Heres what you do when you cant travel faster than light, but can travel through time. You go back to the point where your future self can recieve a message calculated to recieve it for the time it takes for that message to travel. Its the same with futurama on omacron perseai 8 when ler wanted to see the season finally but the broadcast got cutoff. All he would have to do is send someone closer to earth the monitor the signal until the rerun came on, then race back to ler and give him the completed episode.
or yet send a message so that red dwarf in the past would receive it before the accident, preventing red dwarf crews demise and more importantly for rimmer his death
@@sword4005 Red Dwarf has branching timelines, so all that would do is create a parallel universe where the accident never happens. It doesn't help "our" characters from their perspective. They're still marooned.
If you remain in the exact same physical point in space without anchoring to a physical body you would technically be closer or further from something. Harry Potter actually does this type of time travel with the Time Turner. The object is linked to a giant physical object to keep the user relative to it so when they use it they don't end up in space or ground. Of course flying by these rules means you're also subject to dangers such as things being or not being where they were in the past or future like MIB3 where they give a subtle nod to this when J goes back in time.
There would also be a problem with your orientation relative to the anchor object. If you went back 12 hours you'd be on the opposite side of the anchor due to Earth's rotation. Depending on your latitude this might also put you at a different altitude, i.e. some distance above ground or buried under it.
Which is exactly why an earthbound time machine could never work. Whatever time you go to, the earth isn’t there anymore and you’d find yourself floating in space. We must travel through time and space.
@@geoffkryten I don't think time travel machines are possible in the first place, one of many problems would be arriving at the correct destination; with no "receiving" device it'd be like trying to send an electric currentfrom an open wire to a precise position somewhere in the space near to it, accurately, with no sort of antenna or beacon to guide it... it'd flail around wildly until turned off, or never reach out in the first place
@@DisemboweII Your premise makes sense, but I don't think your reason why does? If it were that, then time travel is possible from the moment someone builds such a receiving device. You couldn't travel back further, but could travel back to that point or any point afterward...? I'd just flatly agree that it isn't possible, receiving device or not.
@@geoffkryten in order to be in the same space you need to be relevant to another part in space so you could use the earth as the relative point. Sorry I cannot word it any better than that.
@@Lord_Skeptic yes but everything is always in motion, so you just need to do the math to figure out where the planet was on the date you want to go there.
If they still access to red dwarf's stais chambers the time drive could effectively serve a similar role to ftl travel. You'd need to plot your course how long it will take you to arrive your destination and then set the time travel accordingly before going into stasis. Anywere and when achieved. The drawbacks is you can't account for what might happen to the ship while your in stasis.
Well, yes, but given that Lister had the idea to go into stasis to wait out the trip back to earth in... the second episode of the first series, and then just... doesn't do that or mention the idea ever again, we can only assume that they were not viable for some reason (or, as is actually the case, the writers just forgot..!)
@@rosePetrichor I think the main issues were Cat's huge wardrobe that he insisted on taking and Rimmer's insesant micro managing and general interfering. They never out right stated to my knowledge the stasis Chambers were no longer functional.
@@animemanXLK the thing is, if Cat's huge wardrobe needed to go into stasis to survive the trip then it shouldn't have existed in the first place; all the stuff on the ship apparently survived the nuclear accident and 3 million years out in the open just fine, lol
Well the next episode. After they destroyed the time drive they went back to the time ship and got the portable one so Lister could get Indian Food in the 20th century only to end up in Dallas the day of Kennedy’s assassination.
Considering space expands over time, they could travel back in time, and then travel in space as a short cut as the distance to Earth would be closer by the shorter expansion in the time frame of the past. But the guys aren’t smart enough to figure this one out. 😂
nice, safe and dull - yeah right, as if the Middle ages could be called that, especially since 1421 was when the Hundred years war was once again in the active phase (the Henry V. phase) in France and the Hussite war of religious unrest was spreading throughout the central Europe.
Well, it's nice, safe, and dull three million years worth of space travel distant from Earth. Which, assuming they didn't have encyclopedic knowledge of ancient history in that region of space, is incredibly lucky. Go back about two billion years in Larry Niven's Known Space universe, for instance, and you arrive in the Thrintun Empire, a galaxy-spanning slavery based imperial civilization run by carnivorous telepaths capable of mind-controlling any known species with relative ease. They were only overthrown because one of the enslaved races (the Tnuctipun) were so much more intelligent than the Thrint that they were able to obey the letter of their commands while perverting the spirit by designing devices and bio-engineered plants and animals that were usable to subvert their masters or sabotage them. For instance, they designed telepathic amplifiers to extend the range of Thrintun telepathy -- and made them so strong and long-ranged that one Thrint could dominate a whole planet, thus encouraging them to spread far out and away from each other and over-extend their reach. They designed self-growing lift engines ("stage trees") that stored reactive sap in their trunks and could be harvested to use as rocket engines . . . or triggered to turn orchards into huge bombs. They were commissioned to create livestock creatures with large, delicious brains (as Thrint especially enjoyed consuming brains) . . . and created the Bandersnatch, which looked like elephant-sized slugs, were stronger than bulldozers, and were completely immune to telepathy, disguising the fact that they were actually intelligent beings. If the only recourse against the people in charge when you pop up in your time machine is to be extremely clever, devious, and intelligent . . . the crew of the Red Dwarf would be in deep, deep trouble.
Bless the algorithm that have resurrected this clip from one of the greatest shows ever. I always felt the joke could go two ways. First, we (humans) clearly didn't have much going on, specifically involving space, in the year 1421. Or it was an joke that lester didn't know how "un-nice, un-safe and un-dull" war torn medieval Europe was.
As an adult, i see it is both. Lester is unaware of the chaotic nature of life the middle ages and unaware of their location in the galaxy. What i now wonder is if they are lost (i believe at this point in tbr show they have even lost the Red Dwarf mining ship) in space on Star Bug(?). How would they know where to go if they found a FTL (faster than light) device. I guess it is time to buy brit box and rewatch all of these.
with the time drive what i never understood was why not go back to where they last had red dwarf and then jump to the day they lost her... poof problem solved. yes i know how they resolved it but at the time it was simple logic
What I love is that these characters are too thick to see how they could use it to get home. They could travel 3 million and 200 years into the past, go into cryo deep sleep, and set a course for Earth.
Depending on frame of reference, there are multiple subjective lines of simultaneity between Earth 1421 and Starbug's current location in deep space during multiple time periods, making it impossible to pinpoint 1421 objectively.
@@geoffkryten they’d only have to go back in time a few days. Kryten could work out how far ahead red dwarf is and maybe even go back in time so they’re slightly ahead of red dwarf even
I never understand why when Lister went into Stasis in episode 1, season 1, why Holly didn't just park the ship in the solar system somewhere with a message "Not be boarded for n years until radiation levels decreased...1 surviving crew in stasis...please wait..." (well...I do understand..we wouldn't have the show then would we?)
The issue with stasis pods is you're still at the whim of the universe as you wait in stasis; you could crash into something, be boarded and raided, have faulty technology that kills you during sleep, etc
If it displaces the exact shape of the physical space you occupy with the tree, you've just cut a neat spaceship out of the tree and left a large, pristine tree carving of a spaceship in your original timeline...
That fails to account for the fact that everything in the universe is moving, and some of it quite fast. Frame of reference. The earth is spinning, orbiting the sun, the sun is steaming through space along with the galaxy which is also moving through space etc etc I’d argue that given either time travel or teleportation you’d wind up in deep space a long way from where you expected to be!
Why did they bother going back to the future, if it's a 3 million year trip back to Earth anyway? They might as well go 3 million years into the past and then when they eventually get back, it will be the right time. Though there is a chance they won't live that long.
i'm confused at the drive, if they went back in time wouldn't travelling back a few years everyone in the ship be alive? even if that isn't how it worked can't they do that then make radio contact easier where more of the earths space travellers be alive? (i'm aware i'm over thinking things as this is just a joke but still)
The time machine is the essential ingredient though, because the intent for Lister isn't just to return to earth, it's to return "home", to the earth he left behind, with people n shit. Call me old-fashioned but if we and the Egbert Arms are still here in six billion years, I'll be rather surprised.
Janan Choudhury Different theory of time travel. Red Dwarf used the cause->effect theory (whereby changing something from the past instantly alters the future) Endgame used the parallel timelines theory, whereby any changes made do not directly change your history or future... as that could ultimately stop you from travelling back in time, thus creating a paradox... but instead creates an alternate timeline that the changes affect, which is separate from your own.
@@HeartofBattlechannel What's your point? The comment that I replied to was about Endgame. Yes, DBZ did use the same idea about time travel, but that really doesn't mean anything within this conversation's context.
Endgame is brilliant because the shrinking time travel is BOTH time travel and teleportation. You're shrinking down to the quantumverse which connects to the universe at every point- and then you merely pick where you re-enter. The brilliant part is they never explain it, they just show it in action.
