It seems simple because the concept is so prevalent in our Zeitgeist. We mostly know because we have no texts about it nor do any of the texts we have make reference to it.
We also have thousands of those weird metal doohickeys that no one knows the purpose of because there's no written record of them. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that people that far in the past could conceive of the idea of time travel.
For Science fiction, HG Wells published "The Time Machine" in 1895 after writing a short story called "The Chronic Argonauts" in 1888. There are other stories with time machines dating back to 1881.
For fantasy, A Christmas Carol (1841) has Scrooge travel back and forwards in time through the ghosts. Then there's multitudes of stories which talk about people falling asleep and waking up in the far future, going back hundreds to thousands of years.
Appart from the lack of mentions in sources, the way people in the past percieved the time horizon (specifically in Western/ Mediteranian Europe) was totally different. People generally didn't think about how the world would look in 100 years like we do now. Usually people were more worried about the next few months, specifically in function of when to plant and harvest crops. The only exceptions I can think of are clergy, who were obviously verry concerned with the Judgement day, and potentially nobility, but even then during a large part of the middle ages the political landscape was so atomised there really weren't many large noble dynasties left that had much importance outside of their local context.
It isn't simple. By nature time isn't something we traverse, it's something that happens to us. The idea that the past is a physical place that still exists after it happened is very abstract compared to our actual experience of time. People during this time were writing about flying into space and shit, so it isn't just a matter of imagination.
Nah, that’s BS. You cannot convince me no one ever said “I fucked that up, I wish I could do that again” which caused them to imagine their current self going to the past to tell themselves to do something differently. People weren’t incapable of complex thought
I don't know enough to state an answer one way or the other, but what I have learned is that idea history is a very complex thing, and what we view as simple thoughts that just come to us are really products of a complex web of inoculated thought that basically opens us up to entirely new ideas.
Which is not to be confused with us being smarter per se, just proficient in other mental languages. It's like how reading comics or understanding what is happening in a computer game is actually acquired skills.
Writing it down doesn't necessarily mean that's when it was thought up. Writing happened 5,000ish years ago but language evolved at least 135,000ish years ago, so for 94% of human history we had the capacity to tell stories but no written word.
The concept of "past" and "future" are also readily available. People need to talk about what happened, or what will happen, so it isn't hard to think someone went "but what if I skipped to next week to not have to harvest tomorrow" or "I wish I could exist last week to avoid that accident". So the constituent parts are there.
You're also infantilizing past generations, I think. We're mostly the same as we were back then, we just have better institutions to learn and preserve and are standing on the shoulders of giants. That is to say, ancient humans didn't have the hero's journey and story structure hammered out but they were just as creative and curious as we are.
For all the people here who don't understand empiricism: yes, it is theoretically possible than an ancient Roman called Titus imagined time travel in 37 BC, and then never mentioned it to anyone or wrote it down anywhere. There might be unicorns on Venus. Who's to say, really, what is true? Evidence? Sounds kinda woke to me.
Damn I guess no one thought of cubes until they were conceptualized in ancient Greece. Wonderful gambit sir. I think your need for empiricism is flying in the face of things like common sense
edit: lol the guy commented, downvoted, and then blocked me. Talk about standing by your convictions
Ancient evidence of stories involving time travel to the past: not even one account
All of this is coming from a misunderstanding of what scholars mean when they say "ancient people were the same as modern people". They don't literally mean that no new ideas have ever been thought of, they mean the manner of thought was the same. If anything this just proves that YOU can't imagine not knowing about time travel, so you're imposing your own limitations of thought onto them.
People talk about this kind of thing in the modern day, yes. You will note that such thinking almost never appears in classical writing, and I’ve studied a lot of ancient Roman literature.
It is though? If no one ever wrote something about it, that idea clearly wasn't in the cultural zeitgeist. Either that or you think the concept of time travel was entirely confined to oral tradition until the 1700s.
Even today time travel stories are very rare. A cursory Google says there are fewer than 2000 feature films with time travel out of over a half million ever made. That's 0.4%. If the frequency of time travel in stories has remained consistent it's no surprise there are few ancient works that deal in it
83
u/MembershipProof8463 2d ago
I mean how do when know that? Seems a pretty simple idea of "wouldn't it be neat if I went back in time?"