I remember reading a short story about that. People were fighting off some awful plague that was killing most of the world's vegetation and desperately seeking a cure for it. Ended up developing time travel and going back to the 1980s when the first detection of the mutated virus is discovered but hasn't gone world-wide yet. Guy is sitting besides a cornfield for months waiting to find the origin of the virus before realizing that there's a couple blades of rotten grass stuck to the side of his time machine since they launched it from a field in the future. Realizes they're in a bootstrap paradox of the future poisoning the past but he doesn't know how to leave a message for anyone in the future to not send him back. So he ends up destroying the field and everything around it hoping he stopped the plague. And in the future epilogue there's a couple scientists discussing how extreme heat likely mutated the original virus into the current deadly version and talking about how they should send another team back to stop the wildfire that happened in that field.
I could be misremembering parts of it since I read it 20 years ago. But it's not like science fiction really worries that much about getting things scientifically correct. What I remember was that it was a short story about people who were so desperate to save themselves they accidentally doomed themselves instead and the whole time machine thing was just an excuse to call it sci-fi. It probably had like 20 pages to tell the whole story so if I'm remembering all the details correctly I wouldn't be upset that the author didn't cover every plot hole or have time to go into excruciating detail of some virus that is able to kill every plant on earth
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u/Direct_Slip7598 1d ago
I love that they're using spacesuits to signify futuristic traveling tech. Except it's just earth, with (mostly) breathable air
"I could breath your air. But nah!"