Time Travel and Viruses

I'd say that we'd be more at risk from all the odd diseases (think most of the ones we used to be vaccinated against, but it's no longer necessary). I wonder, though, if there's a little bit of the hospital conundrum - we've got fewer nasties on/in us, but the ones that are there are probably as to the old ones as Spiderman is to the Hulk.

The other thing that would mess you up, if you went back far enough, is the food and drink. Water was less clean, food was less clean ... not that sanitation was universally THE AWFULEST THING EVAR, but we've certainly gotten more finicky about it, so our immune systems aren't used to dealing with it anymore. So you'd definitely be at far greater risk for the nasty gastro-type ones - dysentery and suchlike.

Hm. I shall think on this further.

I was idly wondering the other day what'd happen germ-wise if you brought someone from, say, 1500 into the present day. Intuitively, I suspect they'd be in trouble.

Keep two things in mind. We are descended from the survivors, so we may have some inherited immunity to diseases from earlier times, and the viruses and bacteria have also evolved. What we time travellers would take to the past would be more dangerous to the people of the past, than diseases we might bring forward with us are likely to be. But there may have been rare or local diseases in the past that died out, and for which there never was any immunity gained to be passed on.

There is only on way to know for sure how modern people would be effected by diseases of the past, and I am willing to volunteer to be that guinea pig.

Viruses mutate at different rates. Some, like influenza, come up with new strains each year, others (like HIV) are so variable and rapidly changing (even within one patient) that finding a common antigen to use in a vaccine at all has been a challenge. Many virus strains seem to be more stable across time, though. I'm not a virologist or immunologist, so I can't say for sure why this is in most cases.

I'm thinking that people who lived long ago would very possibly be more robust to the different strains of virus that existed in their time and place in than we are, since the ones who survived childhood have probably been exposed to a lot of them and recovered.

However, going back in time and bringing a strain or variant that didn't exist in that time and place could indeed be devastating.

I suppose whether or not the plagues from the past altering the present or plagues from the present altering the past thing is possible would depend not only on your take on the current level of knowledge of biology in your world (we are currently able to dig up bodies that died of things like the flu or plague (not a virus, but a bacterium, but some of the same principles apply) and do genetic analysis of the bugs that killed them and compare them to current strains, and I'm guessing this technology will continue to improve), but also, the issue of paradox and whether or not your time travel system allows you to alter the past or bring things from the past forward to the present.

Connie Willis deals with issues like this in her time travel books. Her premise is that the time stream is resilient, and it corrects itself in various ways. Like if you went back in time and tried to assassinate Hitler, various events would conspire to keep you from doing so. Also, the net (or whatever it's called) keeps people from making drops at all to places where they could physically alter the time stream (being seen making a drop is a big one--her characters sometimes end up in the wrong place because being seen by the wrong person at the wrong time could alter history).

So someone who harbored a modern virus that could, say, wipe out the ancient Maya, could not travel to that time and place in her universe (and the time traveling historians do take precautions by screening and vaccinating their time travelers and all that).

Her plots tend to revolve around people dealing with unexpected consequences or unanticipated aspects of this property. Someone getting dropped in the wrong place or someone getting stuck in the past are common themes, though to Say Nothing of the Dog was a more humorous story about trying to track down a historic artifact that had disappeared during the bombing of Coventry.

She did deal with the black plague, and with a modern superflu epidemic The Doomsday Book.

It's a great book, and I recommend it.

My God that would be the ultimate bio-terrorist. Sending someone back in time to spread modern diseases in a time before vaccinations, killing hundreds in the past and thousands of their descendants in the future. They could demand a lot of money to cease their time-meddling. Sending someone back to stop them would only screw with the timeline further, effectively rendering law enforcement powerless.

Man, villains are kind of jerks.

/tangent.

Roxxsmom said:

Viruses mutate at different rates. Some, like influenza, come up with new strains each year, others (like HIV) are so variable and rapidly changing (even within one patient) that finding a common antigen to use in a vaccine at all has been a challenge. Many virus strains seem to be more stable across time, though. I'm not a virologist or immunologist, so I can't say for sure why this is in most cases.

I'm thinking that people who lived long ago would very possibly be more robust to the different strains of virus that existed in their time and place in than we are, since the ones who survived childhood have probably been exposed to a lot of them and recovered.

However, going back in time and bringing a strain or variant that didn't exist in that time and place could indeed be devastating.

I suppose whether or not the plagues from the past altering the present or plagues from the present altering the past thing is possible would depend not only on your take on the current level of knowledge of biology in your world (we are currently able to dig up bodies that died of things like the flu or plague (not a virus, but a bacterium, but some of the same principles apply) and do genetic analysis of the bugs that killed them and compare them to current strains, and I'm guessing this technology will continue to improve), but also, the issue of paradox and whether or not your time travel system allows you to alter the past or bring things from the past forward to the present.

Connie Willis deals with issues like this in her time travel books. Her premise is that the time stream is resilient, and it corrects itself in various ways. Like if you went back in time and tried to assassinate Hitler, various events would conspire to keep you from doing so. Also, the net (or whatever it's called) keeps people from making drops at all to places where they could physically alter the time stream (being seen making a drop is a big one--her characters sometimes end up in the wrong place because being seen by the wrong person at the wrong time could alter history).

So someone who harbored a modern virus that could, say, wipe out the ancient Maya, could not travel to that time and place in her universe (and the time traveling historians do take precautions by screening and vaccinating their time travelers and all that).

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Apparently she does not accepth the Many Worlds Interpretation. Which would explain why she never explained how her time travelers got then. I only read two of her time travel novels, so I missed her thoughts on Hitler. In fact, there are some universes among the Many Worlds in which he was murdered, but that didn't change anything here.

Her plots tend to revolve around people dealing with unexpected consequences or unanticipated aspects of this property. Someone getting dropped in the wrong place or someone getting stuck in the past are common themes, though to Say Nothing of the Dog was a more humorous story about trying to track down a historic artifact that had disappeared during the bombing of Coventry.

She did deal with the black plague, and with a modern superflu epidemic The Doomsday Book.

It's a great book, and I recommend it.

Click to expand...

I did enjoy The Doomsday Book.

Niccolo said:

My God that would be the ultimate bio-terrorist. Sending someone back in time to spread modern diseases in a time before vaccinations, killing hundreds in the past and thousands of their descendants in the future. They could demand a lot of money to cease their time-meddling. Sending someone back to stop them would only screw with the timeline further, effectively rendering law enforcement powerless.

Man, villains are kind of jerks.

/tangent.

Click to expand...

I believe that was done in some universes. I wish I could find a way to do something in the past that would affect this universe, but I haven't figured that out, yet.

King Neptune said:

Apparently she does not accepth the Many Worlds Interpretation. Which would explain why she never explained how her time travelers got then. I only read two of her time travel novels, so I missed her thoughts on Hitler. In fact, there are some universes among the Many Worlds in which he was murdered, but that didn't change anything here.



I did enjoy The Doomsday Book.

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Well, I don't know if accept is the right word. It's just not how things work in her time travel universe. It's a different approach to the potential paradox of going back in time and doing something that could erase one's own existence. It creates different types of conflicts and different potential resolutions.

One of her books (forget which one) mentioned that there were early attempts to send agents back to kill Hitler, but it never worked. Something always stopped it from coming to fruition. That's when the phenomenon was discovered.

Her stories play with the frustration of ships in the night, missed phone calls, miscommunications and all that, and there is often a theme of the characters not knowing for sure if it's just normal absurdity or if it's the net protecting the time line in some cases.

One thing to think about is that nature tends to select for viruses that make the host less sick.

I.e. You're more likely to go out and infect others if you feel okay. If the virus makes you feel lousy, so you hole up in bed alone, or kills you off too quickly, it's less likely you'll pass it on.

For example, Syphilis is no joke, even now, but when it first appeared in Europe, it killed people in a horrific way (sores all over the body, and madness) within weeks or months. Today, after a few days or a few weeks, you would get one sore. After a month or three, you would start getting more serious symptoms. Part of that improvement is that Europeans gained some immunity to the disease, but it's also that the most successful strains of Syphilis were the ones that didn't nuke the host quite so quickly.

Interestingly, Syphilis may be the New World's one biological payback for all the diseases the Old World sent over--they think the disease came [edit: may have come (see Buffysquirrel's answer below)] to Europe via Columbus' sailors.

You might want to research something called "the English sweats", a sequence of serious fatal epidemics a couple of centuries and more ago. These waves of deadly disease simply disappeared as recognizable infections, and what they were remains a mystery, as I understand it. Remember also that AIDS and the Ebola virus were unknown just a few decades ago. You don't need to go very far afield to find mysterious diseases.

Remember also that time travel is an SF trope, not a realistic enterprise, which gives you about as much creative leeway as you could possibly need in constructing a story.

cw

It can go both ways. Historic people will be naive to certain novel pathogens, current people will be naive to historic pathogens that have been eradicated or that they are otherwise naive to. There is little immunity passed down genetically, at least in the classical sense, so we as current people don't have some kind of collectively stronger resistance to disease, we just have better hygiene, better vaccines for prevention, and better therapeutic treatments.

So do what you want, and read abstracts on scholar google for ideas.

Eta, what you are really considering is the epidemiology of a disease. You can research the epidemiology of other outbreaks. All bugs are very different, as are circumstances, so if you really want to do this, you could make it happen however you want. I would be skeptical of a pandemic, it's not that easy to get a virulent bug plus a widely (globally) susceptible population, but you could make it plausible.

Sounds like an interesting premise. It's a bit like what happens when a disease passes from animals to humans. When humans first domesticated animals we started to catch diseases from those animals. As a result, the average human life expectancy fell. So much for progress!

But I have a logic problem here. If a character goes far enough back in time and starts making major changes, there is a very good chance that he will wipe himself out in the future. After all, don't they say that a huge proportion of us are related to Charlemagne? Or anyone else from that far back.

Okay, you argue, we slip into the many worlds scenario. The time traveller creates an alternative history which branches off from his arrival back in time, creating a new future. But then I wonder why he would want to do this. What benefit would we have from an alternative world we could not get to? Unless we could get to it, I suppose. But if we could do that why would we need time travel?

Then there is the problem of unintended consequences. A time travel virus might kill a huge number of people, but how do we know that the survivors don't end up more successful as a result?

Interesting territory. Lots of questions.

Roxxsmom said:

Well, I don't know if accept is the right word. It's just not how things work in her time travel universe. It's a different approach to the potential paradox of going back in time and doing something that could erase one's own existence. It creates different types of conflicts and different potential resolutions.

One of her books (forget which one) mentioned that there were early attempts to send agents back to kill Hitler, but it never worked. Something always stopped it from coming to fruition. That's when the phenomenon was discovered.

Her stories play with the frustration of ships in the night, missed phone calls, miscommunications and all that, and there is often a theme of the characters not knowing for sure if it's just normal absurdity or if it's the net protecting the time line in some cases.

Click to expand...

O.K., then she took the narrow view, that there is only one world, so any changes have to fit into it.

jjdebenedictis said:

One thing to think about is that nature tends to select for viruses that make the host less sick.

I.e. You're more likely to go out and infect others if you feel okay. If the virus makes you feel lousy, so you hole up in bed alone, or kills you off too quickly, it's less likely you'll pass it on.

For example, Syphilis is no joke, even now, but when it first appeared in Europe, it killed people in a horrific way (sores all over the body, and madness) within weeks or months. Today, after a few days or a few weeks, you would get one sore. After a month or three, you would start getting more serious symptoms. Part of that improvement is that Europeans gained some immunity to the disease, but it's also that the most successful strains of Syphilis were the ones that didn't nuke the host quite so quickly.

Interestingly, Syphilis may be the New World's one biological payback for all the diseases the Old World sent over--they think the disease came to Europe via Columbus' sailors.

Click to expand...

Yes, Syphilis is endemic in llamas. I didn't find out who moved it to humans, but people have gotten Syphilis from llama bites.

I think that question's come up a couple times in comic books (clearly the high point of research possibilities. ) I didn't read Countdown, but if I understand right, I believe that he had a disease, and because of the virulence it needed to get past his 31st-century immune system and infect him, it was incredibly deadly in the past. (Something like that anyway)

On the flip side, I think Booster Gold neglected to prepare for everyday germs when he traveled back to the 1980s in his first solo series and ended up getting deathly sick.

We're talking about evolution here, right? The way our immune system has adapted through time to cope with the various diseases around us? Is there a point in time that we could get back to, in which the diseases of that time don't recognise our bodies as something they could infect? If I travelled seventy million years back in time, could I catch a cold from a T-rex?

Teinz said:

We're talking about evolution here, right? The way our immune system has adapted through time to cope with the various diseases around us? Is there a point in time that we could get back to, in which the diseases of that time don't recognise our bodies as something they could infect? If I travelled seventy million years back in time, could I catch a cold from a T-rex?

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No, it doesn't work that way. First, it would be more the evolution of the bugs rather than evolution of our immune system (which is basically naive for every newborn... We don't inherit immunity. Maternal immunity from milk is the only thing there, which are antibodies and clear from the system after a period of not getting milk). Also, bugs evolve to infect very specific hosts, it would take time and a lot of exposure (close living) to get a T. Rex bug to become virulent or even infect a people... This would be zoonosis - not super common - most bugs are very specific to their host.

jjdebenedictis said:

Interestingly, Syphilis may be the New World's one biological payback for all the diseases the Old World sent over--they think the disease came to Europe via Columbus' sailors.

Click to expand...

That theory took a bit of a whack when bones with damage identical to that caused by syphilis were discovered in a European pre-Columbus. It's possible that it was pre-existing but perhaps in a slightly different form. Of course, if the syphilis doesn't get you, the mercury treatment will....

This is a really interesting idea. I've read a lot of time travel stories where the person going back in time screws up the future, but not with germs.

Buffysquirrel said:

That theory took a bit of a whack when bones with damage identical to that caused by syphilis were discovered in a European pre-Columbus. It's possible that it was pre-existing but perhaps in a slightly different form. Of course, if the syphilis doesn't get you, the mercury treatment will....

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Well, that evidence isn't conclusive either. The damage could have been caused by other diseases, such as yaws. This article notes that while they may never tease out the disease's roots for certain, modern-day strains of syphilis resemble those found in South America.