The 14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
5. Let’s Do The Time Warp Again…and Again
Time travel as routinely depicted on screen is pretty silly and almost never holds up to the barest of scrutiny because it usually ignores or at least hand-waves away one basic fact: nothing in the universe is truly stationary.
Or, as Monty Python put it:
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving, and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, that's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, a sun that is the source of all our power, the sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see, are moving at a million miles a dayIn an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'
The Earth spins on its axis as it moves on its orbit around the Sun, which itself orbits the Milky Way Galaxy’s center of mass, and the galaxy in turn is moving through space, which itself is expanding at an accelerating rate. Hop forwards in time just one hour and the Earth would’ve moved 8x its diameter out from under you.
As someone said, “It is very cold…in spaaaaace.”
The slingshot around the Sun thing at least avoids most of this, but in 300 years the Sun will have moved along its orbit just over two trillion km (2,082,801,600,000 km), or about a third of a light-year, so each time the Bird of Prey does its spin around the Sun to go backward or forwards 300 years it ought to have to boogie a couple of trillion clicks to find the Earth.
Time travel in movies? Dumb.