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Time travelers should be much more concerned with viruses

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Michael Moorcock’s 1969 classic novel Look at the Man It’s about a character named Karl Glogauer who goes back in time to witness the crucifixion. Historian Richard Carrier the novel says it presents a fairly accurate portrait of first-century Judea.

“[Moorcock] it’s not about trying to describe every detail of life, it’s not about trying to create color, that’s where all the mistakes could come from, ”says Carrier in section 479. Guide to the Geek Galaxy podcast. “He’s describing the scenes so easily, because his narrative is so minimalist in its way of constructing, that he escapes those problems. So it becomes a compelling story in context, because there aren’t many places where he encounters history and makes a mistake.”

In Look at the ManKarl is able to locate Jesus quite quickly. But Carrier believes that finding Jesus in reality would be a real challenge, because all the information we have about him comes from highly reliable sources. He says that finding a particular person in ancient Jerusalem, a city of over 70,000 people, can take a lot of time and effort.

“I would like to sit around and wait for someone to talk about that particular prophet,” he says. “I would try to experiment with all the local sects and see what they are doing, and I would try to guess that. And as a historian I would use a double duty to document all sorts of fresh things that have nothing to do with Jesus while I’m there, and maybe leave it in a time capsule, buried in a pot. new Nag Hammadi discovery, the books of the time by travelers of all time “.

In general, Carrier believes that science fiction authors tend to underestimate the difficulties that time travelers would have in surviving the past. “You’d need a little bit of consolidation,” he says. “You have to figure out how to get used to eating habits, language, money. You would have to organize a lot of things, because it’s basically an adventure mission. Basically, you go to the Congo with what you have on your back, and then you have to get the basics of your operations and invent things, and then you can relax and wait for any scene or event you want to see. ”

One of the biggest threats would be viruses, a subject that is rarely addressed in science fiction. “The problem with time travel is that if you went back in time, you would probably wipe out the entire population, and they would probably kill you in months with viruses that don’t have immunity,” Carrier says. “So note the authors of time travel: you need to achieve universal immunity so that the time traveler who goes back can carry non-immune viruses in front of everyone and have viruses that his body has never encountered.”

Listen to the full interview in section 479 with Richard Carrier Guide to the Geek Galaxy (above). And see some notable points in the discussion below.

Richard Carrier’s time travel:

“If I had to go to the past and it was the Roman Empire, I would probably choose after the victory Vespasian, from everything I’ve read, Vespasian seems like a very pragmatic friend. I feel like I could go there and convince myself to establish proper constitutional government in exchange for certain technologies of the empire, such as the railroad and the printing press. Maybe gunpowder. That wouldn’t solve all the problems — it would turn the Roman Empire into a British Empire, which is basically a small improvement, but it’s still a long way off — but if we established that constitutional government, we could have social progress as well as scientific and technological progress a thousand years ago. , and we could avoid medieval hell. ”

Richard Carrier – en Babylonian Talmud:

“We have the whole Babylonian Talmud, and it mentions Jesus and the Christians, but the curiosity always puts the story of Jesus’ execution a hundred years before. He puts it after death Alexander Jannaeus, in a kind of Hellenized Jewish context. [Jesus] the Jewish authorities are stoned — there are no Romans, because there are no Romans yet — the Jewish authorities are stoned in Joppa than in Jerusalem. There’s this different narrative. It is set in a completely different century. And he’s definitely the same guy – Jesus of Nazareth, who was Mother Mary, everything. … It’s usually dismissed as a kind of change or a mistake, but the truth is, it’s hard to explain whether there was a real historical Jesus. “

Richard Carrier in his book Jesus from outer space:

“The first Christians were preaching that Jesus was a foreign space, he was from Claudus The day the earth stopped. That was their vision. You really don’t understand the origins of Christianity if you don’t understand that. There is a great backlash against the anachronistic belief that it did not come from “outer space”, it came from “heaven”. But then that was outer space. The idea that the sky was another dimension — that you can’t get to it in this universe, that it’s somewhere else — is a modern idea. That wasn’t there then. Then the sky was literally there. You can point it out. You could see if you had a telescope, if you have a rocket you can go there. That was heaven. ‘

Richard Carrier in hallucinations:

“These [early Christian] sects, especially these marginal sects, were very obsessed with having views, so they sought ways to do so. Many of them might be attracted schizotypal people who do not have schizophrenia but have a high tendency to hallucinate. … We now have a very hallucinatory-hostile culture where a hallucination is immediately cured as a mental disorder, is not a real friendly and so on. The culture we live in now is radically different. In that culture, hallucinations were respected as a true vision, and you could rise to the levels of a religious movement, making encounters with the divine more hallucinatory and fascinating. “


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