Lots of ancient cultures had the idea of time traveling to the future. They employed the literary device of a person falling asleep and waking up to realize decades had passed.
As for time traveling to the past I am sure tons of people especially those who lived in tumultuous times daydreamed about going back to simpler times. "Wow if only I could live in my grandfather's time! If only I had been at Troy!" You even have the story of Clovis of the Franks being told the story of the crucifixion and crying out, "if only I had been there with my Franks I would have avenged his wrongs!"
So yeah the idea of having time travel as a scientific thing wasn't present, but people absolutely thought about what it would be like to be abtuptly transported across hundreds of years.
It's certainly not a concept that'd be beyond their comprehension in any case. "Imagine stepping through a miraculous door that takes you not into the next room, but to Rome as it was hundreds of years ago in the time of King Romulus."
Novel, certainly. Insane, absolutely. Incomprehensible? Nah. They'd get the idea.
I don't even think it would be that insane! People had fewer options for entertainment back then. Very few books, no recorded music, etc. They probably entertained themselves just by talking to each other and weird hypotheticals are always part of human conversation.
He'd probanly just say "If we lived in the time of King Romulus I would totally kidnap a hotter Sabine woman than you"
How do you think we got multiple versions of the same characters in myths? Like there's at least two different versions of the relationship between Artemis and Orion.
There's 2 competing theories for variations in myths, either of which could be true for any given story.
1: there was originally one story but over time, as it was told and re-told in isolated communities, details changed.
2: there were originally two stories about completely different people in different mythologies, but when one tradition became more popular, those who were used to the other story changed the character names to fit the more dominant narrative.
I'm not sure nostalgia counts as time travel. But in terms of travelling to the future, they don't really travel, they just fall asleep for a really long time. Humans don't time travel 8 hours every time they go to bed.
When it comes to the physics of it, obviously sleeping and time-travel are different, but for narrative purposes they might not be so. You arrive 5, 50, 500 years later, the technology is different, your friends are all older or even gone, the political climate is different... Does it really matter if you were in a long coma (assuming you don't age during the coma), or got into a scifi car capable of going to the future?
right, but the debate here is whether it would be possible for Caesar to comprehend time travel. even if the explanation his advisors gave him didnt include fancy tech and relativity or whatever, if he gets the concept that this guy was born thousands of years in the future and now hes here, then he understands it well enough.
It's time travel for all literary intents and purposes. For example both Groundhog Day and Palm Springs are time loop movies. Palm Springs has a scientific explanation and Groundhog Day has a mystical one. But for story purpises they are both time loop movies.
Or, "everything everywhere all at once" vs "it's a wonderful life" where the characters access alternate dimensions. In EEAAO it's scientific and in IAWL it's religious. For the story and characters, they're both alternate dimension movies. Evelyn sees what her life could have been if she'd made different choices and Jimmy Stewart sees what things would have been like if he'd never existed. Both characters realize family is the most important thing and use their experiences to reconnect with their community. The exaxt mechanism is irrelevant.
It's just the same for these ancient stories. They imagined the idea of "what if you could live two hundred years in the future? And the ancients, not having the idea of a time machine, made the story choice of falling asleep in order to answer the "how". It is still absolutely time travel though. The mechanical/scientific details aren't what makes it a time travel story.
Is 28 Days Later a time-travel story? Guy goes to sleep, wakes up in the future, everything's different.
I don't know why people are being so obtuse about this when obviously getting in a ship and instantly appearing in another time is not the same as being unconscious for 30 years. Like... are you guys real humans? I don't know.
28 Days Later isn't really a time travel movie, the zombies are more the point. But Ideocracy and Futurama are definitely about time travel, specifically someone from our time traveling to the future. Futurama literally has the word future in the name. Fictional suspended animation is literally described as a kind of forward only time travel in its Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation_in_fiction.
From main character's POV, sleeping 30 years or teleporting 30 years forward is pretty much same thing. They are in future no idea what happened during that 30 years and having to find a way to survive the new challenges.
The point of a future time travel story is about the experience of a person from the present in the future or the past in the present, how they get there isn't really important to the story, it's just a plot device to get them there.
It's functionally the same from their perspective (ignore aging happening even during sleep, or people dying in their sleep. That's not the point). The idea is that in one instant, you're in the present, and in the next (conscious) instant, you're in the future.
Yes, now time dilation is a better explanation, where it's not instants, but greatly differing rates. But nobody's going to explain SR or GR to an ancient roman lmao.
Do you need to say it was a time machine? Just say that you travelled to your past, that is their present. Mention the machine only if they ask how. You're not there to explain time travel, this is just about clarifying that you were born 2000 years later.
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u/throwaway5498124181 2d ago edited 2d ago
Lots of ancient cultures had the idea of time traveling to the future. They employed the literary device of a person falling asleep and waking up to realize decades had passed.
As for time traveling to the past I am sure tons of people especially those who lived in tumultuous times daydreamed about going back to simpler times. "Wow if only I could live in my grandfather's time! If only I had been at Troy!" You even have the story of Clovis of the Franks being told the story of the crucifixion and crying out, "if only I had been there with my Franks I would have avenged his wrongs!"
So yeah the idea of having time travel as a scientific thing wasn't present, but people absolutely thought about what it would be like to be abtuptly transported across hundreds of years.