You find yourself in the cretaceous

[untermensche]

No. That is not what I mean. I wrote what I mean.

I always liked the saying, "reality is not only stranger than you imagine, it is stranger than you can imagine" since I first heard it. Science is continually proving that it is. You seem to have your inflexible, fixed belief about reality so deny anything that you don't understand which is anything you don't already believe. That belief being wrong in many cases.

You saying gibberish is not interesting then.

You are not visiting my now.

You can never visit my now. I am there.

I can't believe I came all the way from 1970 for this horseshit.

You mean the horseshit that 1970 still exists out there somehow just waiting for somebody to return to it?

Yes. Childish horseshit without a shred of evidence to support it.

The total lack of evidence does not bother some.

Their delusions are real none-the-less.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I would bring a specially designed T-Rex saddle and harness. I assume they will immediately let me put it on and let me ride them. I'll make myself king of the dinosaurs. I'm pretty sure my plan is flawless.

 

[untermensche]

I have nothing against fantasy and fiction.

They are great and humans are amazingly creative.

But science is something else.

 

[DrZoidberg]

It reminds me of the first English settlers in America with the genius and only slightly flawed plan of that that natives were just going give them food. They did not have a plan B.

 

[Politesse]

It reminds me of the first English settlers in America with the genius and only slightly flawed plan of that that natives were just going give them food. They did not have a plan B.

That was plan B. Plan A was to farm the wilds and turn them into a new England, a task they thought they knew how to accomplish but absolutely did not. They genuinely believed that as civilized folk, they obviously would be able to sustain themselves in the new landscape.

Or like folks in this thread thinking Tyrannosaur defense would be their biggest survival problem, in a time period populated by neither humans nor any familiar edible plants except for seaweed and the odd flower here and there...

 

[DBT]

So who actually said that Tyrannosaur defense would be their greatest problem? Anyone? I think not. Another Strawman.

 

[Politesse]

So who actually said that Tyrannosaur defense would be their greatest problem? Anyone? I think not. Another Strawman.

No, but it's been the only real sustained topic of conversation, and supposedly the justification for making the whole thread about guns as well. Literate concerns like food, water, infection, and environmental hazards have all been shrugged off in favor of T Rex killin'.

 

[untermensche]

They know about T-Rex.

What microbes might be around, nobody knows.

Or will ever know.

 

[Politesse]

They know about T-Rex.

What microbes might be around, nobody knows.

Or will ever know.

Nobody knows, but a traveler to the Cretaceous should absolutely be worried.

 

[untermensche]

They know about T-Rex.

What microbes might be around, nobody knows.

Or will ever know.

Nobody knows, but a traveler to the Cretaceous should absolutely be worried.

Yes. That person should care.

 

[Jarhyn]

So who actually said that Tyrannosaur defense would be their greatest problem? Anyone? I think not. Another Strawman.

No, but it's been the only real sustained topic of conversation, and supposedly the justification for making the whole thread about guns as well. Literate concerns like food, water, infection, and environmental hazards have all been shrugged off in favor of T Rex killin'.

Yeah, personally, I would probably bring either my falcata or my ka-bar. The former would be more useful for heavy work and defense, the latter more for small stuff. That said I'd probably pick the Falcata more readily just because I'd want something that could guarantee the moment force to penetrate tough hide.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. The total amount of energy and matter in the Universe remains constant, merely changing from one form to another.

Yes. So matter can be created by the use of energy. It's something we do routinely (for example at CERN).

You can't add or subtract from the totality of matter/energy in the universe.

Taking an atom from today into the past is adding to the totality of matter/energy in the universe. Impossible.

Saying you can just get rid of the atom in the past is claiming to be able to subtract from the totality of matter/energy in the past. Also impossible.

Fantasy. Not science or any potential science.

Disagree--time travel means there is a temporary period with excess matter. It's a loan, it gets repaid.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

They know about T-Rex.

What microbes might be around, nobody knows.

Or will ever know.

Nobody knows, but a traveler to the Cretaceous should absolutely be worried.

Actually, I wouldn't worry too much about microbes. Few things attack both humans and reptiles.

 

[untermensche]

They know about T-Rex.

What microbes might be around, nobody knows.

Or will ever know.

Nobody knows, but a traveler to the Cretaceous should absolutely be worried.

Actually, I wouldn't worry too much about microbes. Few things attack both humans and reptiles.

No way to know what microbes infected dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs are also bird-like and birds carry viruses that can infect humans.

Good thing this is not a real thing anybody will ever have to worry about.

Shame to go all the way back and find the Earth's past waiting there and just die from some infection in a few months.

 

[bilby]

They know about T-Rex.

What microbes might be around, nobody knows.

Or will ever know.

Nobody knows, but a traveler to the Cretaceous should absolutely be worried.

Actually, I wouldn't worry too much about microbes. Few things attack both humans and reptiles.

Reptiles weren't the only animals in the Cretaceous. Mammals had been around since the Triassic. And bacteria will live in almost anything. Unexpected bacteria, or even symbiotic ones that find themselves in the 'wrong' tissues or with the 'wrong' immune responses, cause all kinds of nasty diseases and conditions.

If it comes to that, influenza viruses and pox viruses (to take just two of many examples) can easily jump species from birds (ie Dinosaurs) to humans. That's why 'bird flu' and 'chicken pox' are a thing.

 

[Politesse]

They know about T-Rex.

What microbes might be around, nobody knows.

Or will ever know.

Nobody knows, but a traveler to the Cretaceous should absolutely be worried.

Actually, I wouldn't worry too much about microbes. Few things attack both humans and reptiles.

Are you attempting to communicate that you believe only reptiles and reptile-associated microbiota were the only inhabitants of the Cretaceous?

 

[DrZoidberg]

Actually, I wouldn't worry too much about microbes. Few things attack both humans and reptiles.

Reptiles weren't the only animals in the Cretaceous. Mammals had been around since the Triassic. And bacteria will live in almost anything. Unexpected bacteria, or even symbiotic ones that find themselves in the 'wrong' tissues or with the 'wrong' immune responses, cause all kinds of nasty diseases and conditions.

If it comes to that, influenza viruses and pox viruses (to take just two of many examples) can easily jump species from birds (ie Dinosaurs) to humans. That's why 'bird flu' and 'chicken pox' are a thing.

Easy? SARS has most likely been circulating for centuries in a bunch of different animals, yet took until now to jump to a human host. That's with maximum exposure to a huge and dense population of people. A lone human in the cretaceous should statistically be completely safe from any viruses, even if all the reptiles he ever meet is full to the rafters with bird viruses, and they do a lot of snuggling. It's only when you get large and dense populations of humans there's a good chance for it to happen.

 

[DBT]

The Spanish Conquistadors were not greatly effected by the viruses of the new world, yet the native populations were decimated by the viruses introduced by Cortez and his crew.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

I don't see why it is logically impossible to displace yourself in time any more so than it is to displace yourself geographically. My position and its effects on the world are fairly consistent whether I'm performing them at t1 or t2. If I can manage to transport myself to t2 from t1, it doesn't create a "paradox", I'm just now affecting things from that standpoint. Are you guys appealing to some sense of "fate" or "destiny"? I don't see why the future couldn't be altered. We know that the future can be altered. We do this all the time. We just usually can't see the effects of our actions until they transpire.

No, it's not about destiny. But suppose that you go from t2 back to t1, centuries earlier. So, at t2, you exist. At t1, you begin to pass on viruses that people at t1 have never encountered. One of your ancestors dies as a baby. Then you are never born. But how come you exist at t1? Two ways of looking at this that are consistent:

1. Parallel universes. You exist in your universe of origin at t1. The other one is different, and there is no counterpart of you in that one. The baby who died wasn't really your ancestor, but a counterpart of some sort in the parallel universe.

2. By going back to t1, you already destroyed the universe at any later time. So, there is no you at t2 (this is kind of a parallel universe scenario, but more destructive).


Are there other ways?
Yes, but either they do not affect the present, or they are very, very weird. And even in the weird ones, there is a problem that it's already happening, so the present gets destroyed from the past anyway.

I mean, suppose you go back to t1. Your very presence there changes the future, and somehow the changes propagate forward. Do you still get born? Even tiny differences can snowball. But in any case, with billions of years yet to come, other time travelers will go back and mess the time line so many times over that you get out of existence anyway. And I have yet to see a consistent model of that, which also is in line with our observations and does not result in some kind of global skepticism like the universe as we know it existed for a minute or a year or something like that.

I am still there in t1. This isn't the movies. But were I to return to t2, it might look different than I expect. It would be complicated to consider a "present" that is in constant flux due to time traveler intervention, but the world is pretty damn complicated and weird in the first place, if you're trying to model how it works, as you say.

(actually, t2 was the later one, but anyway), it's not that it's weird or complicated, but that you need a model of how you have a stable...present? well, not really present, since it's also the future of some past, etc., but I mean how you can have a consistent timeline at all. When do the time travelers travel from? The future? But that one does not exist because it's altered by other time travelers from....when?

With parallel universes, there is no (big) problem, because travelers are just jumping universes and that's that. With a fixed timeline (i.e., the actions of the time travelers are already factored in in the present, and indeed in any time after their trip), also not a problem, but nothing gets changed with respect to that timeline. But I do not see how to make sense of the other alternatives. Can you present an idea of how this would happen?

 

[DrZoidberg]

The Spanish Conquistadors were not greatly effected by the viruses of the new world, yet the native populations were decimated by the viruses introduced by Cortez and his crew.

This is explained in Jarred Diamond's, Guns, Germs and Steel. Europe is attached to Africa and Asia via land. That's the difference. It's just statistics. Eurasian viruses had a much greater exposure to a greater variety of humans for a longer time. As soon as any specialized human virus would emerge in Eurasia it would quickly rip through the populations leaving only the most resilient alive. This is why Africa have the greatest variety of human specialised nasty's. Their viruses and parasites have had more time to specialise. If their vectors are tropical insects it's not going to spread out of Africa over the land bridge. When humans became farmers 10 000 years ago viruses spread explosively to much greater damage. Further making the surviving humans more resilient. The American human population has been isolated for 15 000 years. That's your answer.

They gave us syphilis. We gave them a huge bag of nasties.