How does time travel work in the Terminator franchise given the nature of the time travel devices and the movement of the Earth?
Given the mechanism of time travel shown across the Terminator media (films and TV series) - namely, the traveler being sent from a machine to a point where there is no receptor device - is there anything in-Universe that explains how the traveler even appears back on earth, given not only the axial rotation of the earth, but also its movement around the sun?
Best Answer
In Terminator Genisys, Kyle and Pops have a bit of back and forth on it.
Reese: Just make sure you show up. Don't wanna have to steal someone's pants again.
Pops: I have the Coordinates in San Fransisco, I'll be there.
Spoiler: He wasn't.
This is after they explain that they need a future tech cpu to calculate the Time Displacement Engine.
Pops: There's no governing Technology in this time that can control the Displacement Circuits.
Reese: You needed a CPU from the Future to make it run (Pops Removes T-800's CPU from the detached Skull) And you couldn't exactly use your own.
Reese and Conner leave Los Angeles in 1984. Pops ends up showing up at the right time (2017), at the right location, only to be stuck in San Fransisco traffic.
So the TDE, using a Terminator brain can target a general location as part of its programming of the time travel circuits. Considering how simple it is to calculate rotation and movement using real world math and computers, a future tech cpu would find that easy to do. Mostly accurate planetary movement was made hundreds of years ago in real life. Copernicus's 1543 Heliocentric theory, improving by Kepler's ~1610 Laws of Planetary Motion, which in turn was improved by Newton in 1683 with Newton's Laws of Motion and Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation. Planetary movement, proven by a bunch of primitives with nothing but fancy telescopes.
So the TDE allows travel in both time and space. It just needs to be properly programmed.
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