This question came up to me a while back, but it still intrigues me. What if you went back in time through a wormhole, time machine, or another means and brought your most up-to-date computer you could bring with you. Lets take an MMO for example. Say you got a specific sword that was released recently, and you went back in time to about 6 months beforehand. How would the game handle that? Or how about going even further back in time to before the MMO was even conceived. Would the “servers be down” for you or would something else happen? These of course are examples, and I am sure you can think of other scenario’s that are similar.
I moved this to Not Thrive because time travel is not a scientific topic.
From a software engineer perspective, these are pretty simple to answer: the MMO client would contact the server and ask what’s my inventory etc. So the player would not have the item, and even further back the game would just say “server not found” or something. If there was a game that stored the items on the client then, the server would likely encounter an error about the player trying to use an unknown item, likely the server would just cancel the action (or if it was badly made, it might crash).
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what if you went back 1000 years and gave the people the most up to date tech would that make us more advanced?
I dont think people in the Middle Ages knew how to use computers, let alone having electricity. You would probably just be burned at the stake for witchcraft.
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i mean if you teach them perfectly and everything goes to plan
They still don’t have electricity, the tools and resources necessary to build more or the knowledge to do so. It would last a couple hours and be forgotten in history.
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Attempting to teach them would get you arrested for trying to preach your witchcrafty ways, and you (Like fnarr said) would be burned at the stake.
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What if you gave tech from today to primitive hominids? Answer : they would probably break it… no just kidding.
The hell you mean just kidding?! We break stuff that’s one month old! We have the balls to call ourselves advanced, but really we’re just as prone to mistakes as any other intelligent animal. The only reason we break stuff less is because we have the ability to tell each other “no, don’t eat that it’s poisonous” or more accurately “please don’t break this thing that is twice your salary”.
Breaking stuff that’s one month old? You must have met uncautious people, for I’ve rarely broken 1 month old stuff (it happened for me to break glasses when I was a kid, but now… I’m the only one to be very cautious in my home). I don’t know how people can possibly break their phones so easily.
8ball has a point, primitive hominids wouldn’t comprehend the idea of a computer and as such would treat it with the same finesse and care as a rock (If they weren’t scared of it)
that is exactly what i said @blackjacksike
No, @zenzonegaming. You were talking about people at 1000 years from now while I was talking about primitive hominids in lower paleolithic age (60’000 years to 3.3. million years).
I’ve always wondered what would happen if you sent a really powerful computer to the people that developed the first computer.
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