Esta questão é discutida na p. 24 de Paul J. Nahin 's Máquinas do Tempo: Viagem no Tempo em Física, Metafísica e Ficção Científica (2ª edição, ISBN 0-387-98571 -9):
Portanto, há um trabalho central que reconhece o aspecto de deslocamento espacial das viagens no tempo: a nova Timescape por Gregory Benford .Of course, one might argue that Wells' machine does actually move, because it is attached to the Earth, which is certainly moving, but it is not clear why this should result in the time machine arriving in the temporal past of the Earth, rather than in some past region of space (almost surely a vacuum.) The general problem of where things are for time travelers has been nicely illustrated by the physicist Gregory Benford in his novel Timescape. In that story the world of 1998 is on the verge of total ecological collapse, and an attempt is made to change the past by aiming a backward-in-time message via faster-than-light tachyons (see Tech Note 7) at the pivotal year 1963. When the principal scientist involved in this effort is explaining the process to a potential financial backer, he is asked, "Hold on. Aim for what? Where is 1963?" The scientist replies, "Quite far away, as it works out. Since 1963, the Earth's been going round the Sun, while the sun itself is revolving around the hub of the galaxy, and so on. Add that up and you find 1963 is pretty distant."
O outro que o Dr. Nahin menciona é um conto antigo, "Dead End" por Malcolm Jameson , em Thrilling Wonder Stories , março de 1941 (disponível em Internet Archive , clique aqui para opções de download):
An understanding of the question "Where is everything?" actually goes quite a bit further back in fiction. For example, after looking through a TV-like gadget to view the past, one character in the 1941 story "Dead End" (Jameson) complains, "You said you'd find Captain Kidd's treasure, but all I can see is fog and static." He is told that's because "It's too far back—1698 or thereabouts. The Earth was billions of miles from here then, and there are too many cosmic rays between." The "cosmic rays" are presumably the cause of the interference.
PS Veja um exemplo melhor, ou pelo menos um anterior: " The Derelict of Space " (1931) por William T. Thurmond e Ray Cummings , publicado originalmente em Wonder Stories Quarterly , Outono de 1931 , disponível em Internet Archive (clique aqui para obter as opções de download). Eu cito porções da revisão de Everett F. Bleiler em :
The exploratory spaceship sights a strange copper disk-like vessel in space. It is obviously derelict, and an elderly member of the crew recognizes it as the Deely time machine that left Earth around forty years earlier. The space men board the vessel, find six corpses and a manuscript kept by one of the time travelers. [. . .] The gimmick is that while the time machine moved in time, it was stationary in space; the universe moved away from it, leaving it isolated.
Esta história foi realmente escrita por Cummings com base em um enredo apresentado como uma entrada do concurso por Thurmond. A "ciência" de viagem no tempo foi criticada em uma carta "Encontraria a Terra Debaixo deles" pelo leitor Jack Cypin em Wonder Stories Quarterly , Inverno de 1932 (disponível em Internet Archive , clique aqui para opções de download), que foi refutado em uma carta de Thurmond em < href="http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?62198+c"> Wonder Stories Quarterly , primavera de 1932 (disponível no site aqui para opções de download).
P.P.S. Este aspecto da viagem no tempo é abordado em R. A novela de 1981 do Lafferty "Bank and Shoal of Time" :
"All ghost appearances are time trips. But time is sticky stuff, and it is always local," Rowena lectured them. "We are in a galactic drift of several billion miles a year, so there is no way we could return to any spot on earth in any past time according to absolute location in space. The spot on earth now would be billions of miles away from the same spot on earth then. But time clings to local physical objects, like a world, and all physical objects are deeply imbedded in time. Time is very cohesive and it can only be moved in quantum hunks, and we can only move out of the common time stream by quantum pushes. So a ghost has to bring part of his ambient with him when he comes, and his minimal ambient is his own clothes. This makes a difficulty for those who believe that travel in time consists of reconstructing people and things, molecule by molecule, in the visited time. How much more difficult the clothes would make it! And yet ghostly time visitants are almost always clothed.