RE: Traveling Through Time Will Kill You (But Not How You Might Think)
We are not a unit of life as many of us like to believe but rather a cluster of thousands of forms of lives all meshed up together into one ultra living thing - us. In a way we are a small universe that hosts all sorts of living organisms (from bacteria to viruses) and if something is off, shit can hit the fan pretty fast.
I get the idea of nature being the ultimate force in reality but I'm not sure what you mean by we are "not a unit of life but rather thousands of forms of lives all meshed up together"...How are you suppose to know this?
A recent historical example of this can be demonstrated with Europeans when they discovered the Americas. They didn't have to do much since the natives started dropping like from common diseases that had no immunity. Many Europeans died as well. For example, part of reason Africa was not colonised as easy was due to the tropical environment that killed Europeans by the thousands.A great book on this is Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond.
Haven't read the book but what about the thousands of Europeans who settled in Central America, Brazil and other tropical parts of America?
I think the main reason Africa wasn't settled like America was because it wasn't as densely populated especially South America. Civilizations in Africa were more numerous and in some cases more organized like the Ethiopians and West African groups compared to its American counterparts.
I think the point is that we rely on bacteria, like those found in our gut, to digest food. We are also made of millions of cells which can be thought of as "thousands of forms of life all mashed up together." I think it is interesting that everyday we have thousands of cells die and new ones produced. Think of all of the dust that is created by shedding dead skin cells. Indeed, we are individuals, but we are made of living cells. Because of the mutations of viruses and our immune systems, we could possibly (unintentionally) kill off people from the past if we were carrying some bug with us. Assuming there is some new mutation or disease in the future, our immune system would likely be overwhelmed, but people in the future may have had generations of evolution to guard them against that disease.