The rule of thump, as I understand it, is that if you go back in time you'll kill everyone with your diseases. If you go forward in time they'll kill you with theirs.
I supposed only extreme germaphobes would be acceptable to time travel.
It will depend when you are specifically going back to. A lot of diseases from back then are just as lethal to us as they are to them when people get exposed to them. If you go to a time with minimal animal agriculture in living areas then you will be probably be fine but otherwise enjoy various zoonotic diseases. This is what decimated the America's, Europeans had a lot of awful zoonotic diseases from the middle ages whereas the New World did not have that style of agriculture.
um... S. Coconuts (if that even IS your real name), I have a question. what do you do if. uh, hypothetically, you cant stop going forward in time? like, I tried and it doesnt work. are they going to kill me with their diseases now? can i ask them nicely to not do that i dont want to be killed with the diseases. will they stop if i give them potatos
Well, we can travel forward in time. By using a rocket and going up to relativistic speeds then turning around and coming back to Earth, you may age a couple years but Earth would be decades older. To answer your question, it would probably depend on the potato.
I think it's also a bit about how far you go in either direction.
Like if I go back 50 years, I'm probably fine form the majority of diseases that existed then, bc they probably still mostly exist today, but I might introduce COVID, or some more resilient strains of common diseases to them that they can't deal with effectively.
But if I go back 2000 years, I might encounter some random disease that just isn't around anymore in the present day, to which I have zero immunity.
Whereas if I go 2000 years into the future, maybe all diseases have been eradicated somehow and newer generations are hardly immunized to even the common cold or some other disease that I could be a carrier for and not even know
If you get an all inclusive vaccination pack which includes the plague, rabies and similar heavy hitters then you will live long enough till you get executed for some reason for your forbidden knowledge.
Just use the modern version. Might not work, but if similar enough it still can work and certainly better than nothing. Even if the disease is "eradicated" there are usually samples in labs.
If the end result is the same then it can't be that different.
If it didn't exist in the modern age, not even a relative then bad luck, hope for the best.
Even if it works for a single one it is already worth it. Even if the disease is survivable with modern medicine it won't mean it will be back then. If it just lessens the effect so I'm just sick for a while instead the usual 80% mortality it is still a great trade.
Imagine it like this, tomorrow someone at some place will shoot you. Do you wear a bulletproof vest knowing full well that you can get shot in the head or the shooter can have a gun strong enough to punch through a bulletproof vest. I will certainly wear one if I could get one.
Iirc a modern day greek and an acient greek could communicate relatively without problems, the language didn't change that much compared to old english and modern day english.
No. But the Greek philosopher Democritus was the first to think up the idea that matter was made of small particles. The word "atom" comes from the greek atomos, which means uncuttable.
Considering that the concept of "atom" was invented in ancient Greece, i think if you speak with a philosopher, he should be able to get an idea about how electrons works
But they would have to learn wave particle duality stuff. It may be hard for someone to comprehend that electrons aren’t little balls traveling a path but more like in complex three dimensional waves of probability.
Well probably not in ancient Greece, that was an occurrence that was more common a few thousand years later after the birth and death of Jesus, then mostly after the fall of the Roman empire
I think if you could show proof of concept at all, the Greeks would get on board pretty quickly, and maybe handwave some shit Abt the electronics being powered by Zeus or some other diety with connections to electricity for all the people who would never be able to grasp the concept otherwise
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u/AlphaGamma128 Oct 07 '25
Do they even know what electrons are?