Oh dear, I actually wanted to avoid the topic of “black holes” – traveling at the speed of light is complicated enough: As we know from the popular cartoon, you can’t shave beyond the speed of light because the light reflected by the mirror no longer catches up with you. And I don’t even want to think about brushing my teeth on the event horizon. If we can trust “Star Trek”, we will end up in the past, where the toothbrush had not yet been invented …
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And to prove how badly I want to procrastinate from the scene I’m writing, I asked AI to do some calculations. It seems that, for a tooth brushing that takes 2 minutes for our hero on her spaceship, back on Earth that would be 10 years. (Plenty of assumptions here that I won’t bother to post–but this would place her pretty close to the event horizon.) 
Ha! Sorry about that!
I suppose the point is that we can’t expect AT to work out these kinds of calculations. The author would have to do that. But we can expect AT to let us create multiple instances of the Timeline view and line them up visually according to a scale that it could calculate as a simple ratio.
But, now that I think about it, we couldn’t expect AT to account for the changes in time dilation across, say, the events of a novel where speeds of spaceships change from scene to scene or where our hero somehow escapes the gravity of a black hole and continues on. But the author can calculate these things and simply assign the event the start date/time and end date/time.
Well, if we accelerate our spaceship to a fraction of the speed of light, the time dilation changes continuously, which unfortunately makes the linear extrapolation as you recently suggested useless. This is where two separate Aeon projects would actually help: Earth time, for example, where only departure and return dates are recorded, and shipboard time, which is linear, but only locally.
To avoid these problems, the warp drive was invented, where all relativistic effects cancel each other out and where “stardate” applies everywhere. Except, of course, in the area of large masses, which are used for time travel to the 1980s.
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We’re noodling exactly the same problem. Do you suppose the author could calculate the start and end date/time of an event under time dilation from the perspectives of the participant and the observer, and assign them to the same event according to each timeline? In other words, AT could have an inspector for an event that displays the start/end of the event for Timeline A and for Timeline B. The ratio would be worked out for that scene. This could take place for each scene but there would be a default ratio if not. Couldn’t AT then display the timelines together while also accounting for time dilation?
This is what James T. Kirk’s exam at Starfleet Academy was really about. He only passed because he escaped to a parallel universe where warp drive was present and the test questions were about simpler things, such as the “Kobayashi Maru Incident”.
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This made me laugh. Somehow, I hadn’t thought about warp drive from this perspective. In looking it up, I see it began as a narrative device, not as a scientific idea. Talk about writing your way around a problem!
So, from the perspective of AT, the linear timeline restraints on the proposed multiple timelines can remain for many (most?) authors and still represent a massive step forward for the software. Those who want to write stories where something like warp drive isn’t available can always do manual calculations sufficient to fix the event on differing timelines (much as sci-fi authors do now, anyway).
Okay, I’ve abandoned all hope of writing my scene this morning.
Have you been following this guy? He’s on a five-year mission to build a 40-foot model of the original Starship Enterprise. https://youtu.be/kdDXeIpphZA?si=XrrO0pmGrHlf_fBm
But seriously…I do think this discussion offers some solid and practical ideas for the AT development team to offer multiple timelines. There are a whole lot of folks who would like to see such a feature, that’s for sure.
I’d say the practical benefit to the SF writer is the realization that you have to invent a system that either negates the relativistic issues through “technological progress” (Star Trek), or simply ignores them (Star Wars).
By the way, when I was drawing comics once, I came across a very useful guide on the web: “Perspective – how to avoid it”.
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Yesterday I must have strayed a little from the actual topic. In the meantime, as I also write SF myself, I have given some thought to the question of multiple calendars. What is the benefit for a writer anyway?
If the story is to take place on several worlds, the local season and time of day can be of decisive importance, as they can influence the plot via the environmental conditions.
Independently of this, the question of general narrative time progression can be considered, e.g. in order to maintain an overview of the chronology and of cause and effect in non-linear narration. This would require a “standard time” that applies everywhere.
First, I ask myself about the leading view, i.e. which of the calendars in question has the greatest influence on my work? Do I need to pay close attention to how the local conditions in the narrative world are changing? Do I need to coordinate events that take place in different “time zones”? Do I have flashbacks that need to be visible on a timeline? Are there historical time references that should be precisely documented, or will a few notes suffice?
I’ll assume that these are important questions that I want to use AT as a tool to clarify. I have also come to understand that the majority of users do not want a workaround, and certainly do not want to go down the path of external calculations and scripting. In addition, the timeline is linked to the plot structure of the narrative in AT3, which makes the maintenance of several timeline projects for one writing project seem inadequate.
All this would certainly suggest that the developers are looking into this question.
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Let’s hope.
Incidentally, a long-known problem concerns the time zones, a kind of simplified special case of our topic, so you could say. As far as I know, Aeon Timeline does not yet have a solution for this.
So, if something like what we’ve been kicking around were created, this would be straightforward, if not trivial. One calendar would be in one time zone, and another in another. Once the display ratio is established, the author could scroll both timelines and see where a given event would be on the opposite timeline.
I suppose a more difficult problem would be the shift to daylight savings time and back to standard time, in those locations that practice that. As a practical matter, a separate timeline could be made for each such period–it certainly would be more reasonable to expect the user to do this than for the development team to build in some sort of time shifting capability.
There would be a simpler solution for the time zones with daylight saving time, which is probably also implemented in the operating system: The internal timestamp could be UTC, while for the time scale and events you can select the time zone for display at any time in the current session. However, the technical catch is that this creates a special case in the system of generally definable calendars.
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