It's been awhile since I've seen this movie, but don't the people in the future need to smoke cigarettes in order to adapt to the air there, or is that another film I'm thinking about...and if so, can you smoke a menthol?
shareNo, they smoke cigarettes when they come to the 20th century, because the cigarettes make the air here taste more like home to them.
share[deleted]
I read the book and the reason for the smoking was that the people in the future were so adapted to the posins in the air that they needed to smoke in the past to survive.
shareI know I am replying to a very old post. I have this movie in my collection and really enjoy sci fi time travel movies. I worked with a guy back then who was a full blown sci fi geek who explained it this way to me about the smoking. As you saw, they would smoke cigars just before coming back here and smoke while here so that when they got home the polluted air of their world would not kill them. In other words, a non smoker from this time would not be able to breathe very long in their time but by smoking here, yecch!, their lungs would not recover with our "cleaner" air to the degree that they would not be able to breathe when they got home. I hope this makes sense.
sharebut the kidnappees, which are coming from the present, are also thrown into this polluted future.
they get a special treatment after revival, but... hm!
I always thought that the women were forced to smoke so that they would "fit in" with the people of the late 20th century--as if everyone was walking around with a cigarette in their mouth. I took it as an anti-smoking message.
But the other responses make more sense. :)
No he told her there wasn't enough "degeneration" in her lungs. It was stupid because they don't explain the necessity of degeneration in order to survive. I kept waiting for them to explain why and they didn't.
“Honey, there’s a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick!”--Alvy (Annie Hall/1977)
maybe its like how if we drank super clean water we would get sick, we need the minerals and stuff that are in it
share[deleted]
That is because you are used to distilled mineral water from this time period. You have no idea what minerals may be in the water 1000 years from now. For all you know a nuclear war has dumped toxins in the water that you would be used to drinking even if your life span is half of what it is now. If you came back to now and drank mineral water it would make you sick so you would have to have additives for it to mimic your own from the future.
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I prefer the concept that time travelers screw with the past because they are willing to take a chance on a new future being better but then things go horribly wrong and the future is worse then what they had.
i think what he means is like people in lets say mexico are fine drinking their water but when an american drinks their water its not so good for them.
shareI found that when I lived in London I hated the taste of the water, it tasted like rust, regardless of where I was, but it tasted fine to everyone else, I could only take it in tea or coffee, never from the tap.
Any time I came home to Scotland the one thing I always looked forward to was a glass of cold water that didn't taste like it had just come out of a radiator.
Opinions are just onions with pi in them.
That behaviour can (and will) lead to an imbalance on your body. Distilled water drains the minerals from your body exactly the opossite way non-distilled water carries them. But, of course, if you feel it does, carry on. Your body, not mine.
shareThat is utter nonsense, and if you stopped and thought about it for two minutes rather than believing and regurgitating pseudo-scientific garbage you read or heard from some other kook, it would be pretty obvious. You get minerals from food. Not only are there more minerals in food, they are much more easily absorbed than minerals from water. If you drink water and eat food, how exactly do you think your body knows the difference between whether the minerals were in the food or the water? That's right, it doesn't. You make it sound like distilled water has some sort of active mineral leaching properties that suck the minerals right out of you. It doesn't. It's the same as mineralised water, just without the minerals.
Please cite peer reviewed scientific papers supporting your claim; otherwise it's b.s.
Doubted an over 2 year post. I have to smoke cigarettes to stay alive. It keeps an arachnoid cyst in back of brain from killing me.
share"No he told her there wasn't enough "degeneration" in her lungs. It was stupid"
Goomba, what he said is, "No new degeneration. The levels of complex hydrocarbons in your blood are depressed. Due to breathing the primordial atmosphere of the 20th century."
She replies that they think their air is bad, but they ain't seen nothing yet. You're blaming the movie, but the fault is yours.
The lung degeneration reason is crap but anyone coming from that bad of an atmosphere would be required to smoke or reduce the amount of oxygen in their blood because they would pass out and die in minutes. To understand you have to look at the system that stimulates and controls your desire to breath. We are all born using the same system where receptors in your carotid arteries monitor your blood chemistry and when the carbon dioxide percentage reaches a certain level, they tell your body to breath. However when your body is consistantly in an enviroment of elevated CO2 like people who smoke today or the people living in their time, have to use the secondary system called the hypoxic drive and that is where the problem comes in.
When the body depends on the hypoxic drive it uses the same sensors in the carotid bodies to stimulate the body to breath but instead of monitoring CO2, it monitors oxygen. Which is a huge problem when these people enter an enviroment or in a condition where O2 is easily available. Because as long as there is plenty of O2 in the system, the sensors have no reason to tell the body to breath. Without any stimulation, these people basically suffocate because there is too much oxygen.
Today, common examples of people that rely on hypoxic drive are people with emphysema or some other form of COPD. If these people are in a situation that requires supplimental O2 such as surgery of from their lung disease, there is the likely chance they will become dependant supplimental O2 and ventilator dependant. These people are normally sent to a ventilator rehab center where they stay sometimes months being weened of the ventilatators.
So having the time traveler's smoke whenever they are in the "20th" actually has merit. However, I think it is more an issue of a broke clock being right 2 times a day than anything else.