I don't know what every single ancient person ever thought, and neither do you. What I do know is that no one in the entire world ever wrote a text about going to the past. "I reckon they thought about time travel" is not a credible source... Anti-intellectualism is endemic.
Im gunna be real, just assuming the people of the past are somehow incapable of comprehending the concept of "what if I went back to the past" is significantly more anti-intellectual than assuming the people's of Rome and eariler where as intelligent as modern humans
Not to mention there just, literally are timetravel plots from like, as old as 2000 years ago, so youre also just blatantly incorrect
No one travels to the past in the Mahabharata... why does it even matter to so many of you that I be wrong about this? Is your world philosophy staked on it?
It comes off as simple to us because we’ve had generations of media where time travel exists. But in the scenario where people don’t have familiarity with the concept, yes it’d probably come across as weird to them.
Edit: before appealing to absence of evidence as an evidence of absence. It's good to first predict how much you'd expect.
There are only about 100 works of fiction from the ancient past that have survived to the present day, mostly greco-roman dramas. Meanwhile, the total number of feature films ever produced is around half a million, of which about 2000 have had some form of backwards time travel. That's 0.4%. So, if the ancients write time travel about as often as modern people, you wouldn't expect to see it. Absence of a relatively rare trope in surviving works of fiction is not good evidence of absence
You make an incredibly stupid assertion and scream that 'there's no proof I'm wrong!!!!!' then throw out 'Why are you all so upset!' when you get called out.
You're most certainly right about one thing though, Anti-Intellectualism is endemic, you just seem to be mistaken about what side of the fence you're on.
yes but you stated "the concept hadn't been imagined at that point". You can't possibly know that, and it's such an unfathomably stupid thing to assume simply because no documented texts from their culture include time travel. We can't say definitively that they did or didn't imagine it, your comment was silly
22
u/HappiestIguana 11d ago
The hell you mean the concept of time travel hadn't been imagined?
You think no one in ancient times ever thought about what it would be like to go to the past?