*

We are not ready for time machines.  Before anyone even tries to rev up a time machine, he or she had better have a working teleportation machine.  It's imperative that the teleportation technology has all of the bugs worked out.  (Ha!  That was a totally accidental joke!  Honest, I didn't intend that . . . See, cause the Fly was about a "bug" in a teleportation -- get it?)  I got in a big nerdy argument about this with a friend of mine a few years ago.  He didn't think that a teleportation machine was necessary.  I never have understood his point of view.  Let me explain my thinking . . . Okay, so say you are sitting in your time machine on January 27th 2008; the flux capacitor is blinking; if you have the kind that looks like a big clock, then maybe you are winding it up; you haven't used it before, so you are just going to do a short test run -- not ancient Egypt or anything -- just 24 hours in the future; you don't want to end up getting hit by a car when you appear in the future, so you're out in the great salt flats or something like that; you turn the ignition or put coal in the furnace or meditate or whatever you have to do,  and you plan to appear in the exact same spot, but one day in the future -- January 28th . . . You have made a terrible miscalculation.  If it works, if you go 24 hours forward in time, but remain in the exact same spot, you would appear IN SPACE.  In 24 hours THE EARTH would have moved.  So, if you go to the same spot -- trouble.  Thus, I think that in addition to a time machine, it's necessary to have a teleportation machine that zaps you to a safe location.  That seems so obvious to me, but people disagree with me about stuff like that all the time.  Am I missing something?  (You know, other than science I mean.)

I ought to do something about my science/sorta-science credibility problem.  Unlike L. Ron Hubbard, I don't strike people as believable.  I thought that I had an awesome trivia question, and when I explained the answer AND my Nova program source, I STILL got flack.  The question was: from the time it's created, how long does it take light to get from the Sun to the Earth?  It's a great question because everyone will say 8 minutes.  But, that's wrong.  From the time that a photon is CREATED it spends MILLIONS OF YEARS bouncing around in the sun before it actually starts the trip to our planet (which takes 8 minutes).  The criticism that I got was that the photon changes forms while it's in the sun, so it doesn't count as light.  That strikes me as bullshit.  First of all, I'm not even sure if that's true.  Second of all, so what if it does change form -- it only counts as light if it's exactly the way it is when it gets to us?  How do I know that it doesn't change form at minute one two or three during its journey from the sun to the earth.  Also, people always talk about black holes and say that "even light can't escape" -- surely the "light" heading into the black hole is under conditions that are comparable in intensity to its experience during the week before it leaves the sun -- yet everyone counts the black hole stuff as light.  I think the truth is that people are very proud of their knowledge tid-bits, and when they don't get a chance to show off, they flip out.  

Or maybe people just want to wipe that smug look off of my face.  Bitches.