Yes but NOT traveling back in time to cause the black plague results in all kinds of worse timeline shenanigans.
There’s a few of these
I think the biggest one for me is quite how much support Hitler apparently had in the Anglosphere before the wars.
Assuming he managed to grow that support without war, I have a feeling we would have potentially had a very fascist 50s across the world instead of the era of progressive politics we actually got. Then whatever inevitable revolution or nuclear winter that followed a couple of decades later, would leave the world looking very different to today.
I often wonder how different the world would be if Hitler had used his power for good.
He would not have managed to get any support if it wasn’t for the hate and scapegoating, he’d be some unknown good guy.
Travelling forward in time could also kill everyone… Our adaptive immune systems are developed somatically and purifying selection is nonzero in humans.
Oh shit, is that why nobody attended the 2009 Time Travelers party? No one wanted to be the person who killed the great Steven Hawking
They knew waaaay more than the rest of us did at the time, you don’t wanna get MeToo’d for a party you went to 100 years ago, do you?
A similar argument could be made for making first contact with an alien species. There’s a decent chance one or both species carries some form of microscopic life that the other has no defenses against, assuming both species can even survive in the environment necessary for the other.
Not only will starship captains and crew not be able to have sex with the hot aliens they meet, “they have an nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere” won’t mean the away team can land without environmental isolation suits. Planets with oxygen in their atmospheres might be the most dangerous ones out there for us.
I personally trust humanity that we will work out a way to have sex with something we shouldn’t rather quickly. Our horniest scientiest and our brightest perverts will find a way, even if it’s at great personal cost.
Yeah, it is probably going to be one of the top 5 reasons to join a starship crew, so life will probably, ah, find a way. For all we know, NASA might even have a focus group working on this already.
BUT that doesn’t mean it won’t lead to the extinction of one or both species involved.
Read “scientities”
Not only will starship captains and crew not be able to have sex with the hot aliens they meet
Not so fast, we do have some convenient barrier device to avoid contamination in this context.
I guess it’s possible to have safe alien sex with a full body latex suit and respirator. Though maybe think twice if the alien has sharp spike features.
At which point would it be worth it anyways?
If the alien is hot and willing. Preferably not crazy, but I’m sure some will take the risk even if they are.
To be less hypothetical and more scary: Think about all the ancient pathogens that are dormant in the permafrost. Those could become a real problem when it starts to thaw because of global warming.
There was already an outbreak of thousand year old Anthrax from thawed animal corpses in Siberia several years ago.
Or any smallpox samples sitting in the back of an old lab, like the ones they found in 2014. Or the smallpox samples that the US and Russian governments keep
as WMDsfor research purposes.The TV show Fortitude has a similar plotline. Would recommend!
Now that I think of it, if you can teleport or time travel and only you go but not the things on you (as is the case with pickier stories)… losing your clothes would be the least of your worries if the countless organisms didn’t also go with you on the trip.
Goodbye, gut biome!
The time traveler’s diarrhea
This is a plot point in The Accidental Time Machine: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21608.The_Accidental_Time_Machine; the main character
spoiler
jumps forward into the future a bunch of times, longer jumps each time, and hits a time where the human population is almost gone, and they’re like “yeah, the fucking time travelers keep showing up and bringing old diseases”:::
Warp drive will really fuck up a lot of civilizations.
Glove and Boots did a fantastic take on this very concept. https://youtu.be/75nBenOWul0?si=4lTY2at2aHtaqN-F&t=144
Schrodinger’s epidemic
We’re all traveling forwards through time.
I’ve felt this would be similar for generation ships. If our civilizations get met up again, everyone would probably die.
That must be the origin of Covid, it explains why they can’t find where it actually came from.
The bacterias would just reproduce as any other organism
This is addressed in The Rise And Fall of DODO. There’s a whole decontamination quarantine period for time travelers.
