1308
we live in an explosion
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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In most media time machines are also teleporters - many are explicitly so, with the destination space needing to be chosen at the same time as the destination time, but even when that's not shown they still make the time traveller suddenly vanish and then just suddenly reappear elsewhen.
One movie I've seen with a more "realistic" time machine is Primer. It's not at all a teleporter or portal. Very slight spoiler:
It sidesteps the whole issue that OP presents because the place where you exit the machine after traveling is just where the machine is when it's turned on to begin with. You can't time travel outside the machine, including to before it exists, and your path (in all four dimensions) is contiguous.
I prefer the H.G. Wells The Time Machine style of time travel , where you affect the flow of time instead of a discontinuous jump.
You're still attached to your current location, things just happen faster (in forwards or reverse). It also means that time travel takes time, which can be a handy plot tool.
Edit: grammatical swipe keyboard errors