I have a vision of travelers from the future keeling over after sampling the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Asian Palace.
Food poisoning might be the least of their worries, seeing that their immune systems would be heavily challenged by unfamiliar air and soil-borne pathogens, as in the case of Martians struck down in The War of the Worlds.
Best to wear bubble suits and eat only freeze-dried tablets - although that would make blending in with the local population difficult.
So 2020 and 2021 would be good years to visit to some degree. Far easier to blend in without actually interacting with the time natives.
How far do you suppose this extends?
If I did a Marty McFly, and had dinner with my teenage parents, I’m thinking that I’m probably fine.
And if I get a craving for an original coca-cola? Other than the cocaine buzz, I’m assuming that I don’t have serious worries about the air in the late 1800s.
What if I want to record Lincoln’s voice when he’s consecrating a battlefield? Do I need to worry about standing among a crowd of people?
I’m sure I’m safe going within my own lifetime, but that’s not as much fun. I wonder when the health concerns really start to outweigh the experience.
That’ll help a lot, no doubt. But the alimentary ailments we’re talking about here are mostly bacterial, not viral. Bacteria mostly don’t have vaccines. Bacterial infections can be treated by antibiotics, but in this case, antibiotics would probably be just as bad.
Even with good food hygiene, you’re going to end up ingesting some bacteria. For locals, it’s usually not a problem, because they already have those bacteria in their guts, and they’ve come into ecological equilibrium with all of the other bacteria in their guts, many of which are essential for good health. Go to a different place, though, and the local bacteria are different, and you basically end up with an invasive species in your gut, which disrupts your gut ecology. And trying to kill off those invasive bacteria with antibiotics would just disrupt it even more, because the antibiotics would also kill off all of the other bacteria.
If food hygiene is poor, then of course there are a bunch of other issues. But there are issues even aside from that, even if you take measures to ensure good hygiene.
This is precisely my point!
It sure sounds like my concerns are valid. I may have to rethink this plan on lunching at Hampton Court Palace.
https://www.hrp.org.uk/hampton-court-palace/history-and-stories/life-at-the-tudor-court/#gs.8kuuvn
I would think you would be passing yourself off as a traveler from distant lands, so the locals would probably accept a little flux as normal. Arrive down-time a few weeks early for your event and let your systems get acclimated to the local biome.
BTW, another key thing you should pack is Mentholatum rub. Apply to your moustache regularly.
Your list is not bad, but what’s missing is a toothbrush and paste.
Suppose we went not 500 years into the past, but 500 years into the future?
For the sake of argument, let’s presume that
How much should we have to worry about germs etc. that have yet to evolve?
Alternatively, in the OP’s scenario, how much danger are we to the 16th century natives?
It need not take 500 years.
How dangerous would it be for someone from 2018 to teleport to 2022 and encounter widespread COVID with a totally naive immune system? We all took that journey together in early 2020 and it wasn’t pretty. Still isn’t; we’ve just become used to losing an extra 30K Americans per year.
500 years from now I’d expect the general population would have safe, genetically-engineered gut bacteria, assuming that there isn’t a collapse of civilisation in the mean time. So you would probably pose a bigger threat to the people of tomorrow than they would to you.
Assuming that the future doesn’t have some technology that makes the question irrelevant in ways we can’t even imagine (which they probably will, because 500 years is a long time for technology), then you probably would have traveler’s ailments from eating the food then. There’s at least as much difference in bacteria over that span of time as there is between Des Moines and Tijuana.
I certainly think that there would be a problem with the kind of bacterial things that give you local diarrhea. Bring kaopectate or similar.
I’d be more concerned about catching random diseases. Make sure that you’re vaccinated against likely strains. Also make sure you’re not going to be carrying diseases that you can give to the local populace and potentially change history.
I’ve long though that if I was time traveling back and wanted o stay at a local inn, I’d want to fumigate the hell out of the place – bedbugs, fleas, lice, and other random nasties would put a real crimp in your vacation.
When people write time travel stories, they generally ignore most of this because they either didn’t think about it, or didn’t want to distract from the main thrust of the story. I certainly did.
If not the medical nanotechnology in your bloodstream should take car of any illnesses. And hopefully you’ve been purged of any viruses or bacteria harmless to you, but would cause an epidemic in the past. Being able to accomplish both of those is almost certain to be a lesser challenge than backwards time travel.
Nanotech could be lethal.
To the non-genetically engineered primitive Human.
There is a short response to this and a longer one. Short one is no and the longer one is hell no.
Today anyplace you go won’t be very far from a medical professional with modern expertise, equipment and medicine. Even if you are currently in the Amazon rainforest, you aren’t that far from an urban center with a doctor.
Plus of lot of even basic treatments are very difficult. The way to deal with the runs is rehydration. Without easy access to safe water, that’s going to be very difficult. Its trivial to make water safe today. Even in quote unquote underdeveloped areas. In the past heating water requires access to fuel, which isn’t a given.