It’s so cleaaaaaaaaaaaan
First, a reality check. If you look over at the mountains or distance, you should be able to see it. The air, when pristine, has a hugely lengthy visibility range. If you can’t see it, two things could be to blame. The first is lovely and quaint. Some water vapour is floating gently in the air as it condenses because of a temperature difference between the night time and the day time. It’ll burn away when the sun comes up and evaporate. The other reason is pollution. Hang on…that wasn’t dramatic enough. POLLUTION! Factories, machines, devices, wall paper, tables, computers (noooooooooooo!) and everything else in between emits pollution in the atmosphere. That is soooooo very awful! Way back when, it didn’t really exist. Huzzah!
I can breathe…
10 points to Gryffindor…I mean the past. In ancient times, the air was just perfect. It was the way that nature and the trees and fauna intended. It had a perfectly balanced amount of everything. Air is 79% nitrogen (used to make that terrible chemical fertiliser that allowed us to eat enough - should we hate it), 21% oxygen (inhaled by you to allow your muscles to move!), 0.9% argon (does anyone know what it does? I don’t), just a teeny-weeny 0.04% carbon dioxide, and a host of other stuff. In the times of the Mesopotamian civilisations, it was very deadly because of all of the fighting, but incredibly clean. Nobody burned coal or oil for starters. This would be fabulous. You could saunter around breathing pollution free air. There would be no micro-plastics inside your blood (yes, really, there are!) and you’d be overjoyed to have almost no respiratory problems. Just don’t mix with other people because there were tons of untreatable diseases back then.
I’m a god!
Travelling back 200 years would be a waste of time, indeed. The world had just discovered fossil fuels and burned them merrily. No, no, you should definitely go back to somewhere more ancient. Even if you immediately stopped learning, you would take back such a wealth of knowledge about science, technology, maths, and pineapples, that you would be like some kind of deity. You would dominate every other human being on the basis of your immense genius. You could be the first person to discover solar power. You could construct incredibly complex things that would make you so wealthy, so powerful, and so outstandingly cool that you would be swiftly declared as a god over everyone. You’ll have to choose your new deity name and your outfit. You’d be a bit like the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz (spoiler alert), who convinced everyone he had magical powers by building complex machines rather than actually magic. As Hamsterman (or was that Spiderman?) was told. With great power comes great responsibility! Well, you can choose to do only acts of kindness and goodness, or….you can take over the world. You can raise armies to conquer and take stuff! Or, you can create some kind of flawless, idyllic society.
But be ever watchful, humans back then would be quite unpredictable. You’d have to keep your wits about you to avoid being turned into soup!!! Also, you’d practically have to live in a bubble to avoid the pestilent diseases of the past. So, there’s that.