If a time machine took me back to the late Carboniferous period, could I find safe food, water and shelter to survive the remainder of my life?
T. Barczuk
Updated Jul 3
Ladies and gentlemen. Please fasten your seatbelts. We are about to depart to the end of the Carboniferous period, 359 - 299 million years ago. Our current time travel technology can only take us there one way. There is no going back.
• Time travel is only the first temporal effect that the traveler would experience. His circadian rhythm would be severely disrupted and affect their life because the day length was only about 22 hours in the Carboniferous period. There could be insomnia, immune system dysfunction, increased risk of cancer, problems with the heart, and even early death from all the above combined during a multi-decade stay. On a short visit, it should be fine.
• An additional factor that would shorten the life span of travelers would be the increased oxygen level in the atmosphere. It was about 28% at the beginning of the Carboniferous period, it dropped to about 24% in the middle and rose again to about 27% at the end. Over the lifetime, if it was a long lifetime, so much oxygen would damage the tissues and increase the speed of aging of humans not adapted to these levels and cause early wrinkly skin and health problems that would cause premature death.
• Another weird temporal effect would be noticed after landing. Animals would seem slower, more sluggish than us. At the time, they might have perceived reality in fewer frames per second than us on average. We do it at 60Hz after additional hundreds of millions of years of evolution of vertebrate animals. There were no warm-blooded creatures at the time yet, so there were no very active animals. They only had sprawling legs while walking, which made them slower. All of this lead to slower reaction times sufficient for survival. Insects might have been faster, but even they only just evolved relatively recently. They weren’t as great at what they did at the time yet.
• The air was filled with copious amounts of spores of various plants. Breathing after some time might even result in death from an extreme allergic reaction, or anaphylaxis in some susceptible individuals. We are more adapted to pollen, which didn’t exist in the Carboniferous period.
• This also means that there were no fruits, and we need Vitamin C to survive. We would need to eat leaves, make teas from bark or eat buds of leaves of ferns, the fiddleheads.
• The good news is that animals shouldn’t be that dangerous at the time, and it might be easy to hunt them for food, at least on dry land. They weren’t that big, fast, or even smart yet. Although, many formidable crocodile-like and crocodile-size temnospondyl amphibians with massive teeth existed in aquatic habitats and widespread swamps. There were also giant, 2.5 m/8 feet millipedes. It’s hard to tell how dangerous they were, but I’m learning they weren’t. They were outcompeted by reptiles soon and died out anyways. Large, flying, 0.7 m/2 feet insects similar to dragonflies shouldn’t have been dangerous to humans. A more significant danger might be venomous tiny animals like scorpions or spiders.
• Another good news is that there might be less danger from diseases. It’s unlikely that many would affect mammals like humans. But who knows? There might be an odd outlier that could infect us. Maybe some mysterious virus. For bacteria, we should take a lot of antibiotics with us.
If we traveled in a time machine back to the late Carboniferous period, it should be possible to build shelter from trees, which evolved recently. Water should not be a problem. There would be an issue with obtaining a balanced diet because there were no fruits, which evolved less than 180 million years ago. The lifespan of the travelers would be severely shortened from all the issues described above.
https://www.quora.com/If-a-time-machine ... of-my-life