Wouldn’t travelling forward in time put you in risk of dying and travelling backwards put everyone else in risk?

  • barkybeak@lemmy.zip
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    3 days ago

    Nobody thinks about that but yes it would. You are not immune to the black plague so you might get that even if you are vaccinated. Plus who knows how many viruses and diseases happened back then.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      This makes sense. What never makes sense to me is when people worry about viruses from ice cores that are a billion years old. Because it works both ways: viruses have to be pretty well adapted to you in order to harm you. There are no such viruses long before humans even existed. I’m sure there are exception, as with viruses that manage to jump species, but I wouldn’t worry much about viruses from before the time of mammals, yet some people freak out MORE the older the ice core is. They’ve seen too many movies about ancient evil escaping old crypts.

    • DomeGuy@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      You are largely resistant to the black plauge, though, if you’re of European descent. It killed a bunch of people when it initially evolved, but never really went away. The humans who survied had modest resistance and adopted social habits that were both passed on to their kids. (Nowadays it’s a simple course of antibiotics)

      Your larger point stands, though, since part of the end of any pandemic is the overly effective pathogen succumbing to the evolutionary pressure to not kill the host, since the bacteria that infects living animals does terrible when those animals die.