Yes, this is why (for over a decade) I've said that anyone elected to any office anywhere on earth, should be launched into space, stuffed in a spacewalk suit, kick out the airlock and left there in total silence for 60 minutes, alone in the still void, watching the fragile rock in front of them suspended in darkness.…

2 things...

But one the ones that's harder to explain...

Of course the Soviets will have had worse mishaps; that's like speculating who'd do best in a fight between Muhammad Ali and a paraplegic. Hell, the entire article is about how the Soviets relied on a tribunal, wherein one happened not to be an idiot, while the US, UK and France uses more advance methods.

Absolutely awesome, but it takes just one of the many bad team to experience one case of bad luck, for an unprecedented and avoidable disaster to strike. And national self immolation by nuke should not be contingent solely on luck.

"Blows" your mind, doesn't it? ^_^

The United States ... have well developed command and control systems in place that guard against accidental launch...

Argh, you beat me to it. ^_^

I have already emailed you back. ^_^

As long as we live, so too do their actions through us. ^_^

Nope, not a vacuum. I can clearly see walls, a feather, a weighted ball, a rig and speaking of "clearly see", that chamber is practically flooded with photons. and even neutrino's i can't see. Come on Brian, you can do better.

I'd be honored to help out in any way i can, but here's the thing: This is a open comment section, often frequented by unwelcomed spambots looking either to spam or sniff for email addresses. I have no reason to think you'd do such, but i nevertheless don't want to leave it lying around in the open.

No worries. And hey, there might be a sci-fi story in all of this. So many have written stories of time travel adventures and paradoxes, but none have ever tackled the problem of making the machine in the first place. ^_^

I might be an atheist, but somewhere in Valhalla or heaven or through the space-time continuum, I'm sure he's raising one in return. ^_^

But that's kinda the problem. You're the first person, in the first version of this machine and you don't know if a nudge of the metaphorical pedal (before calibration) means 10 minutes or 10 million years. That's why you'd be calibrating it in the first place.

My great-grandfather actually disliked Germans more than most.

Assuming the problem mentioned in the article isn't an issue and that a time machine doesn't affect nearby material (gravity well, which would likely destroy Earth and make targeting calibration the least of your problem), then that's a excellent solution.

This brings up a problem I've always been thinking of: How the hell do you build a "targeting system" that puts you at a specific point in time?

You're very welcome.

Uh, nice. ^_^