Well, since this was posted in Science Memes, I'll be so pedantic that science does not support the idea of travelling back in time.
It does support travelling forwards in time, at various speeds, but you'll constantly be aware of where you are (even if one method involves travelling really fast and therefore may still leave you in empty space).
This meme format having a redemption arc is my favorite. It wasn’t super sexist, but it was just unnecessarily sexist.
I have yet to stumble across a sci-fi short story about space travelers finding an entire civilization's worth of dead bodies floating round in space only to realize that they were all time travelers who only got part of the time traveling math correct. They figured out how to get through time but couldn't figure out how to get through space, but since all their volunteers died, they never figured it out and just kept sending people to their doom.
There is a sci-fi short story whose name escapes me of a spaceship using some new FTL drive, but has largely been untested due to an impending doom. The math is said to be solid, however.
Anyway the drive powers up, and the spaceship jumps, and.... all the crew and passengers are left behind, choking in space.
I feel like this could be a scene in Rick and Morty, with someone commenting, "Guess their Math was off"
I'd like to believe that mass (and then by extension the Earth) "defines" the spacetime around it as much as it distorts spacetime near it. I suspect this may even be the underlying cause for the observation of speed of light being constant in the presence of earth/solar/galactic movement.
If I was writing a fiction and felt the need to address this, I would make it so where you wind up is based on the location of the time machine in the time you travel. But also I probably wouldn't and just handwave it
A time machine, at its very very core, is a literary device. You wouldn't bring up this nuance unless it was important to the plot of the story.
It's like warp drives. The point of warp or any FTL travel is to skip the boring parts. You only learn about warp drives when something goes wrong.
Teleporters as well.
I remember having access to one in an RPG (rogue trader, teleportarium), and almost every session was "why can't we use the teleporter for this?". Eventually we made a rule that we could only use it once per session, which meant functionally we saved it for emergencies or something really funny.
There is an enjoyment to solving problems in the engineering sense, but in an oppositional sense you dont really tell any stories other than about how you solved a puzzle you yourself invented
