A bit off-topic here, but historically diseases didn’t always work in favour of invaders, as was the case of the New World. During the Portuguese expansion (and possibly other European empires faced similar problems), it was always very difficult to establish an European population in colonies with tropical climates on account of extremely high death rates due to local diseases. (This was mostly in the Old World, mainly Africa and India, and was probably related either with bug bites or the age-old “don’t drink the water” problem.) The solution was to enroll instead the aid of local “converts” and mixed-bloods, which had the advantage of being immunologically locals, but with more or less the desired European mindset. So, local diseases could be a deterrent, but not an unsurmountable one, given enough resources and determination.
Are you old enough to have had a smallpox vaccine? If not, that’s a big concern. We don’t worry about it these days because it’s been wiped out by vaccines; if you travel back a few hundred years it could be a serious problem depending on where and when you are.
Also, kudos for going off-topic immediately. I think “first sentence of the OP” has got to be a record for a thread hijack.
I totally agree with the article on the subject of time travel and diseases, old and new.
What got me thinking was (and hence the off-topic right from the start), if we admited infection could work both ways with time travel, why would we suppose infection favouring the invader, as with the diseases that whiped out the Native Americans, to be more likely that infection favouring the invaded, as in HG Wells War of the Worlds. I was just pointing out history has examples of infection working both ways.
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, mlhewitt, we’re glad you’ve joined us. For future ref, it’s helpful to other readers if one provides a link to the column in question, when starting a thread. You can see the reason: Canadjun wouldn’t have been so puzzled. Perhaps. No biggie, I’ve added the link for you. Thanks for catching this, and welcome!
For those who are still confused, the column uses “system” instead of “syndrome.” We’ll get 'er fixed shortly.
Also, I just noticed that there’s another thread on this column, so I’m merging the two threads.
Thanks for that - for a moment I had it in my head that the poster was somehow saying that the ancient diseases have nothing on the modern ones - SARS would kick the ancient people’s butts!
As jsalgueiro said, the infections in this situation would probably spread ecually quick on both sides. The thing though, is that we have only one person from the future against the rest of humanity. Maybe this person would die, maybe not… but what’s interesting here (or is for me at least) is not which diseases everyone would get, but the consequenses of them.
Cecil didn’t mention this, so what do you guys think? Could one person accidentally kill off humanity by travelling back in time? And what would happen if the person made it back to 2013, without burning their clothes or taking other precautions? Could we face the end of humanity in two periods of time at once, or are these diseases not so serious as to be able to cause that?
Ps I’m sorry for my english as I’m not a native speaker and only 17 years old.
I’d think to some degree we (modern day people) would have some resistance to the old diseases. After all, we’re the descendants of the people who survived them.
What modern-day diseases would your average Doper take back anyway? I mean, I’ve had a few colds, the flu 3-4 times years ago, and a few sinus infections. Would any of that even phase an ancient person, considering their somewhat unhygienic conditions and probably more tuned-up immune systems?
Hi Kid From Sweden and welcome to the straight dope message board!
Methinks you are asking about time travel paradoxes. According to this book the answer is “It depends”. Time travel is not inherently paradoxical, contrary to popular belief. And if you work off of a multi-verse model, then there are really very few paradoxes. But multi-verse traveling is arguably not time traveling. And arguably so.
I find it plausible that shaking hands and breaking bread with those from another time would likely have pretty large effects on the time stream, due to pathogenic exchange. The world our time traveler returns to might indeed be very different, assuming he doesn’t simply disappear in a puff of logic.
But if you are a time traveler, just go back far enough that you can stop at a local doc’s office and get one.
To expand on that, move through time in smaller jumps, assimilating immunities to “timely” diseases. After all, you have all the time in the world.
That of course works for you own health, not those you might be spreading infection to.
Personally, as much as i love the idea of time travel, I don’t think it will ever be possible.
1.Time is not a “thing”, just a human perception of a sequence of events. Much as sound is just an animals interpretation of pressure waves on it’s nervous system (usually via their own version of ears)'. They both happen only inside your head.
If it is possible, then we should have seen a lot of visitors from the future. Given enough “time” somebody would have come back to this time, and given themselves away for any number of reasons, accidental to nefarious.
“Time is just natures way of making sure everything does not happen all at once.”
source unknown
Time is as much a “thing” as space is. It’s real, not just perception. Time proceeds for all things, not just those with brains or with perceptive abilities.
Powers &8^]
Your argument is almost as thorough as mine, however I remain unconvinced. Not suprising since this is probably as much a philisophical question as it is scientific.
If Space or time is a “thing”, what is it made of? Time is just a way to measure the order in which things happened. If something does not have perceptive abilities (a brick), then there is no time or space ( or anything else ). Things with perceptive abilities can observe (or at least have to deal with) where the brick is at in space, and the order in which things happen around and to the brick. But for the brick… nothing.
And yes, I am well aware of Albert E. and friends and the theories of Relativity. All some of my favorite things. So far though I only see some sort of connection in how we perceive space and time (and mass), but no indication that they are something we can ever move around outside of. Maybe once they get a handle on those Higgs Boson thingys we can make a truly quantum leap in ruling the universe.
The closest we might ever come to time travel would be to lengthen someones life by having them travel at close to the speed of light. Just as soon as we figure out how to get the almost infinite amount of energy it would take to accelerate (and decelerate) an almost infinite amount of mass to almost the speed of light.
Quote which may or may not be pertenent (but I like it)…
“Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but it does not really bring us any closer to the secrets of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not play dice.”
Albert Einstein in a letter to Max Born
If I understand it correctly, the flu itself evolves along with us. If a current strain of the flu was introduced to a society 500 years ago, it would be likely to be lethal to them, no?
Hmmm, would we have some sort of flu grandfather paradox? We take back current flu strains, it spreads through the population, immunity develops and the virus mutates from there. So then when we get to current time, we have multiple generations of mutations past what we brought back originally, so what we have in the current time is no longer what we took back to the past.
There are several ways to get around the time travel paradoxes. In fiction, I mean. In reality there’s no such thing as a paradox, only phenomena we don’t fully understand. When we come to understand them, we realise that either some of the premisses were wrong or they are compatible after all…
The most common way to avoid the time travel paradoxes is plain old determinism. Every thing is set in stone and time travelers not only can change the past, they must, because their trip to the past already happened. Maybe the Black Death or the several bouts of Plague were caused by sloppy time travelers…
Regarding germs, there would be a neat way around the contagion issues. What if time travel was mediated by some sort of avatar? There would be no question of time travelers catching or spreading diseases because they would’t be physically present. The avatar (corporeal, ethereal, holographic…) would be in the past, but the time travelers’ bodies would remain in their own times. If we have no qualms with the universal translator, why should we shy away from temporal projection?