I enjoy your articles. This is intelligent and well thought out. The points you raise had never occurred to me and are very valid (one way around them is the time machine is more of a transporter and there is an interdimensional energy connection maintained between the traveller and the machine so that the calculations of to what point in space and time to return to do not ever have to be made)(I just added that parenthetical upon having written and reread what was then the entire comment).

I have a different take on the concept of time travel, well, actually it's more about alternate realities but it's related to time. This is my 17,043rd human incarnation and that is not remotely close to a vast amount of lives. According to scientists, and I do believe in science but just not as the explainer of all there is, homo sapiens sapiens have been around for 200k or so years. So I realized that each successive incarnation is not into the future from the perspective of the reality we presently inhabit. I can script my next incarnation into what would appear from our perspective to be the past or the future but in effect it's really an alternate reality. This also happens to fit with the views that the universe as we know it is a simulation, which I guess in my view it is but I had not really focused on that aspect of my thoughts until now.

Now all this does not mean I spend a lot of time thinking or trying to learn about my past lives or what my next ones may be. My focus is on this life but sometimes gaining an understanding of a past life experience helps me understand myself in this life.

Sometimes I am asked how I know for certain the number 17,043. I wrote this story to answer that question. https://medium.com/about-me-stories/my-journey-spiritual-and-otherwise-9d5f6aca18ee