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Apple's sci-fi disaster

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Apple’s announcement of its Time Machine app in next year’s OS X 10.5 suggested a giant technological leap. Of course, it soon transpired that Time Machine was just a neat backup utility for Macs, with a fancy interface and ability to save our data at different stages of our work on it.

Why has Apple followed crappy sci-fi convention by depicting time travel as happening in outer space? Apple shows us folders floating in some kind of asteroid belt. If a time machine really did exist, surely it would stay in the one place and move only back and forwards in time – not blast off out of the earth’s atmosphere, past Mars and the recently rather dejected dwarf planet Pluto, just to return to earth with a thud at the requested time of arrival.

This sort of thing really shouldn’t wind me up, but I’m ashamed to say that it annoys me so much that I’ll stick with Retrospect’s ghastly grey interface instead.

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Cynic said on Tuesday, 24 October 2006

I hate to be picky ;) but, since the Earth is moving constantly through space as it rotates, orbits the Sun & our whole galaxy drifts, any time machine would also have to move through space, if only to keep in the same relative spot.

vandy said on Wednesday, 25 October 2006

if you look in the background of time machine you will see the "big bang" which is essentially the beginning of time - so much as we are concerned with

Simon Jary said on Thursday, 26 October 2006

OK, maybe the time machine would travel through space - but not outer space!

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