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By going back and meeting them, you just got them sick even earlier.
So show up in a biohazard suit.
Yeah, because people in 1700s would know why you’re wearing that, and not attack you for being a witch.
A 16th century native American would think this is normal?
A hazmat suit would be such a foreign concept to them, I sincerely doubt their conclusion would be witch.
I would have to be carrying disease to spread it
Even if you aren’t carrying any diseases, the fact remains that you are carrying germs that are completely foreign to their ecosystem, and as such they possess no resistance to. Something harmless to you can be deadly to an immune system that never had to deal with it.
Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a time travel story that addressed this. I guess most writers either don’t know or feel the story would be too tedious with that detail included.
germs that are completely foreign to their ecosystem, and as such they possess no resistance to
There’s a huge difference between the flu which kills 5% and smallpox which kills 95%.
If all foreign germs were equally deadly then European colonizers would have all died from Native American germs.
Yeah, but the Europeans were also bringing diseases on top of that. And make no mistake, plenty of Europeans died pointlessly trying to colonize the new world. It was a harsh and brutal affair and if not for the whole genocide thing I’d have felt sorry for them.
“So I made a time machine and went back in time, gave them the flu and wiped out the entire human species.” The End.
This could be a perfectly fine film, the thing is that plot isn’t really that important. Pacing and emotional stakes are way more important. Add some characters and make the audience give a shit about them. Maybe also make the flu a metaphor for something, then you have a film.
I guess when you put it like that, it sounds kinda stupid.
A more creative person than me might be able to do something with it
Yes you have. You’ve heard of covid, right? Whole world stopping pandemic about 5 years ago. Remember that?
That’s what you just described.
Covid was a time travel story?
Would not be the dumbest conspiracy to come out of the pandemic.
Brave ones just go straight to Warhammer30k or 40k
The main reason native americans had such a hard time fighting back the europeans is that they didn’t have immunity to old world diseases. You should’ve brought vaccines.
You could save literally millions of lives if you could get reproducible vaccines to them. 90% of the population of the continent was killed off before white people even set foot in the area. The set foot on the coast, and disease spread outward very quickly. They walked into abandoned villages, often times. The few that lives were exterminated.
Smallpox vaccine and Kalashnikovs. That’s the way to go.
I mean, the guns can take them out from a distance no? Maybe when they’re rowing to shore.
Some germs and virus can survive outside of a host long enough to be carried by the wind or water. So unless they’re not breathing or drinking they’ll liable to get some infection.
They can shoot the diseases.
Native 'Muricans, fuck yeah!
Comin’ again to save the mother fuckin’ day yeah!! Lmao
There was also couple hundredth years of development difference between them. The rate of development depends on crops and animals available. Middle east had most of the grains we use today, pigs, cows, sheep and goats that they domesticated. Americas had only corn and llamas so the development was slower there. When Europeans came with horses, wearing armor and armed with iron swords and cannons the natives were simply unable to confront them in battle. The warrior class of native Americans (at least in South America) was also still working the fields so they were unable to wage prolonged wars. Even if they would win they would be left so weakened other tribes would defeat them soon after.
Wrong lesson to take away. When Europeans showed up they shat themselves at the amount of food available year round. Because “new world” natives farmed much, much higher calorie and variety of food in much much more diverse environs.
It’s a good bet that 80+ percent of your daily food is explicitly the product of precolombian farming practises and selective breeding of crops.
What happened was specialisation adapted to environs. You don’t plough because there are no draft animals. You don’t use wheels because the terrain won’t support it. You adapt.
Americas had only corn and llamas so the development was slower there
The Americas also had varieties of squash, beans, amaranth, potato and several other crops that could be cultivated, stored and eaten. A lot of those fell out of favor because of colonialism. The lack of animal traction made the european style of farming a lot more labor intensive, but a number of native american communities simply didn’t need them.
Outside of Central America and the Andean side of South America, there were no “great powers”, but hundreds of small, independent groups. It’s a lot easier to deal with a village that cannot call for reinforcements than a city that can. Even then, Europeans weren’t stupid and knew that they needed to ally with locals, which was key to their success.
When Europeans came with horses, wearing armor and armed with iron swords and cannons the natives were simply unable to confront them in battle.
Which is why they quickly learned they had to use guerilla tactics. Also, in the denser forests of Central and South Americas, cannons were usually too much of a hassle to haul and would often be more of a psychological effect than anything, since you can’t aim for shit when you can barely see 100yd in front of you due to vegetation.
They sure had tasty plants in the Americas but I think grain was generally easier to store over long periods of time and offer higher yields so you could feed bigger populations of people and civilization developed faster. I’m not an expert though, just what I’ve read.
Which is why they quickly learned they had to use guerilla tactics. Also, in the denser forests of Central and South Americas, cannons were usually too much of a hassle to haul and would often be more of a psychological effect than anything, since you can’t aim for shit when you can barely see 100yd in front of you due to vegetation.
Yes, I remember cannons mentioned mostly in the initial contact when they could still be used from ships. In land battles better weapons and armor still gave have Europeans huge advantage.
A smallpox vaccine would be way more effective.
Take these gives infected cow tits
Ok but this is like… what most European powers did in North America? Like fire arms was one of the biggest commodities in the various trade networks that developed?
People are so eager to paint these groups as if they had no agency, were niave and helpless in the face of “superior technology”. The reality is that they routinely curb stomped colonial forces for hundreds of years. The europeans were bit players in the grand saga of North America, kept around as a useful supply of certain manufactured good. Isolated little trading outposts at the mercy of native confederacies and empires fighting their own struggles and conflicts that eclipsed the petty squabbles of the Europeans in North America. Spain was the only one with a meaningful presence, and they were getting their asses handed to them by the Nʉmʉnʉʉ and Diné for most of that time. The French and the British getting played off each other like chumps by the Haudenosaunee. For 400 years this was the state of things, only in the 1800s do we see this break down, and yet that is all we remember. That brief period is what is projected backwards, totally ignoring a fascinating and dynamic history.
Give the Apaches some Apaches, the Comanches some Comanches and the Chinook can take over logistics with some Chinooks and so on
And the Sioux? Give them law degrees
The Sioux: How about a Trial of Tears, pilgrim?
Can we do a Battlefield Earth style training montage?
I shall bring horses to the Americas in the year 1011 AD. With any luck, the black plague will get around them anyway, but they’ll recover in time for the yuropeean arrival
yuropeean
yuripean
Yuripeen.
Yuripenis
You’re-A-Peein’ ™
Good time to remind everyone that the virgin soil hypothesis is almost entirely a myth and 99% of native Indians did NOT die from introduced diseases only though it might have been a contributing factor
Yeah it was only 95 percent
It really isn’t true. As an introduction I recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVE6XCES6B0&list=PLaKf5PH0uvWK3m91J9-0pAW-RzTSjSCys
If you want to save the indigenous peoples of the Americas, you should bring them vaccines.
This. Before a shot was ever fired the natives in most “undeveloped” regions were being decimated by pathogens refined in our “civilized” cities. This was long before “smallpox blankets” ever made an appearance.
Don’t even have to bring anything, early smallpox vaccines were little more than ground up pox sores rubbed into a cut. But it worked a hell of a lot better than no vaccine.
Didn’t they use Cowpox instead of smallpox? The virus is similar enough to trigger the correct immune response, but significantly less deadly
Noticing the connection between cowpox and smallpox helped develop a safer vaccine, but prior to that in China and India they invented variolation (grinding up and applying the scabs to cause a milder infection) centuries before European vaccination experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation
Mostly I hate the internet but then you have people who know interesting things and I’m all “fuck yea, internet!”
Then unread the next thread and some dickhead starts things off so idk.
If you never let them near the coast, those diseases won’t matter to you.
So their going to stop all of them from the coast when we can’t even do that now. Yah right.
Go back and sink Columbus, Europeans will assume they were correct about the massive ocean to the West being too big and dangerous to sail across and ignore that direction for a while longer. No Conquistadors is a huge win for South and Mesoamerica.
If you really want to reshape the history of the New World you’ve gotta go back like 12,000 years and convince people to capture and train animals like the camelops and American horse instead of simply hunting them. European diseases were so devastating in large part because New World peoples did not have a comparable livestock culture (that being a major source of disease).
they’re*
Seriously, it’s not hard to understand which is correct. It’s a 5 minute thing to learn, there’s no need make yourself look so fucking dumb.
I always wondered if I got dropped off into 1650s North America if I could get the Native Americans technically advanced enough to have semi autos by the time I die before the huge colonizer/settler events happen.
I bet even just muskets and penicillin could have tipped the scales.
Gunpowder is a bitch. I don’t even know where to find potassium nitrate off the top of my head. You can get sulphur from hot springs and charcoal is simple. From experience, in a lab environment, getting the ratios for a useful explosion is a hard, even when you know what the possibilities are. Unless you have this memorized, that will be a 5 to 10 year adventure.
Thankfully, this is an easy problem to solve. If you’re planning a time trip, just research the locations of potassium nitrate deposits before you go.
Now I’m imagining a movie where someone tries this. Except, as you alluded, the only way to really do this would be to completely change indigenous society. As the movie goes on, it becomes clear the protagonist is just doing colonialism all over again. Sure, they can say, “it’s for their own good though!” The cry of every Christian missionary.
Smart. They would probably think your a prophet if you could do things like that. I think the hardest part is convincing them into at least a semi industrialist type mindset.
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iirc, we were pretty dependent getting nitrates for gunpowder from urine and bat guano until we were able to start synthesizing it.
Guncotton might just be easier, and far more effective.
95% of the population was wiped out by smallpox. Guns weren’t the problem.
Gunpowder would be an easy sell.
Mining/forging might be rough to bootstrap without capitalism. You’d be fighting against their love and respect for nature. Convince a number of them to mine, get black lung.
You’d also have to convince a bunch of different tribes with different languages to stop fighting long enough to fend off invaders, and well, to know the people coming are assholes that will destroy them.
Advanced medicine would be amazing, chemistry.
Honestly, if you wanted them to win, I think you’d just have to get them to band together, maybe bomb ports. If the ships couldn’t properly resupply that’d be one hell of a fight.
Are you a Factorio player? If so, then yes.
“Aborigines of Sydney Cove, I know you can’t understand me but this is called a howitzer and you’re gonna want some earplugs.”
If we’re arming people I think a slightly better solution would have been to go further back and arm the peasants in Europe so they can overthrow the monarchs/feudal lords and dismantle the hierarchical system that sent people to “discover” the world for profit/plunder and did the enclosures at home
I don’t remember the name now (I can find it if anyone’s interested) but I remember reading about a native from south America that spent some time in Spanish colonies and then joined an expedition to North America (think California) as a translator. Once he arrived north he told natives what the Spaniards are up to and to kill all of them. The north was of course still conquered eventually but they did enjoy couple more decades of freedom thanks to him.
That would be a horrible decision. They would likely still die from the diseases spread from europe but also proceed probably having a huge native on native war because i know this is very surprising but native americans also had wars between each other as they were also humans.
I think you underestimate the magnitude of the genocide of the natives. It completely dwarfs the holocaust. Some researchers found it had a noticable effect on the temperature of the planet. About 49.5 million were killed.
Also your comment reeks of “they’re savages!”
Yeah? All humans are savages. I literally said in my comment. If you gave guns to the ancient romans they would also use it to shoot the shit out of eachother. Now, a much better idea would be to go back and tell them them how to defend themselves from the invaders. Also with the power you could get from knowing the future it might be better to do something political like establishing a sort of native american united states in which natives have to respect other natives’ rights and the whole of america is also protected federally under non-natives. They already had their own politics you would just need to tweak it so the british dont steamroll over them.
Also your comment reeks of “they’re savages!”
Maybe if your reading comprehension sucks, or if you’re overly sensitive to certain words
Don’t be a dick.
TBF, he didn’t say shit about them being savages. And he’s absolutely right that they were warring with only basic armament.
Where you two aren’t meeting in the middle is that the indigenous people need to work out proper communication and organize against the invaders with adequate gear. That’s kind of a big ask. To this day we’re trying to keep nukes out of the hands of warring nations and those people are decidedly not savages.
I’m not - suggesting that Native Americans weren’t/aren’t susceptible to human flaws is foolish at best, revisionist history at worst. If anything I did not show nearly enough disdain.
Were aspects of their cultures superior? I believe so, they were certainly better stewards of the earth and sexual violence was very much taboo. However they were also warring, scalping, and enslaving each other for a long time before white men showed up.
Does that mean they deserve genocide? Unequivocally, no. Effectively asserting that they aren’t human simply because the person you’re disagreeing with used terms you dislike is silly. Would you have rather they typed out ‘Native American on Native American’ war? Would that hoop being jumped through suddenly make all of this make sense to you?
Really because they are saying their humans and not the Nobel savage that it seems you like to think they were
“I have black friends” level copium
Dude you need to read up on how native Americans dealt with Europeans and Americans until they were forced on reservations, the black hills were a focal point of war and and while the Lakota Sioux are the current tribe most associated with them in the American cultural zeitgeist the Cheyenne and Arapaho have older links to those hills if I remember correctly. Hell going back to the sale of Manhattan was not the local tribe selling it but their enemy neighbor who sold the land and helped depopulate the island for the Dutch.
In short native American tribes had conflict and hatreds between themselves and fought eachother to their detriment until there was no other way to go forward than to unite.
I’m sure they had conflicts, they’re human. But the colonizers had a greater impact than internal conflict ever could have. Again, 49.5 million out of 50. And your comment still reeks of this idea that the colonizers coming in was somehow a neutral or ok thing. It wasn’t. It’s one of the greatest atrocities committed in the history of mankind.
I’m pretty sure AK-47 has enough range to protect you from airborne diseases. And European countries had wars that were made more deadly with modern weapons. Would it be better if Europe was genocided by some invaders instead?
Not far back enough.
Give the AK47s to the dinosaurs.
To fight the meteor?
T-Rex shit up
