Alternate Universe...that isn't.

Okay, like I said in some of my other posts, my verse is a modern day earth with Augmentation deeply integrated in technology. So the technology is really advanced, to the point of having a builiding that is over a mile high, satelite capable of destroying an entire island, and Space Elevator.

Then I was designing the backstory of the characters and one of them has a history with working with Nazi...then it came to me; wouldn't such a major change have changed many events of history? Why would World War II have happened in the same way and time? Wouldn't geniuses like Newton, Pascal, and Einstein have impacted the world the same way in the original, our, timeline?

Is it something that I can ignore or think over more carefully?

Plenty of stories have been quite fast and loose with history, so you need not feel you will be breaking a rule.

Everybody does it, so you won't be that bad off. If you must explain it, give some song and dance about historical elasticity and paradigm flux integrity.

The roots of WWII stretch far back - some even consider it a continuation of WWI, aka The Great War, rather than a separate war.

Certainly Augmentation and such is going to impact upon the world but there are still going to be the socio-political pressures. The existence of powerful mages may bring about some changes that would turn the tide away from war but possibly bring about other changes that swing it back the other way.

If both "sides" have Augmenters then they effectively cancel each other out and you're just left with the socio-political climate that led to WWI and then the Great Depression and its effect on Germany (war reparations etc - if Augmenters would make the reparations easier to pay back, then the cost of reparations would be naturally higher, resulting in the same level of hardship) and the rise of one Adolf Hitler to power - and battle fields in which Augmented weaponry and Augmented countermeasures were used.

I read a nifty story a while back set in an alternate world where vampires were well known and both sides used them during WWI. As both sides had them, there was no one side with an advantage and you had two theatres of war - humans vs humans and vampires vs vampires (vampires being mostly unable to attack enemy humans as the enemy vampires protecting those humans would intervene and turn it into an "even match").

Pretty much anything you can think of that an Augmenter could do to affect the tide of history, you could think of how other Augmenters would counter it.

Technology could/would progress at a cracking pace, especially if an Augmenter can magically enhance materials available at the time (imagine Leonardo da Vinci with access to light, strong materials when he was designing his flying machines) but that's probably not going to do a lot towards making politicians smart - we still have wars now and our technology far surpasses that of the early-to-mid 1900s. All it would do is make the battle more devastating.

WWI fought with horrific technology, devastating reparations that not even the Augmenters can fix, WWII fought with even more devastating technology, Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed by Augmented weaponry...

Hmm, while most of your reasoning is right, you have to remember that Augmenters are not just for weapons of wars and can leads to other influences...which may lead to other wars, for example...

Food. One of the primary usages of Augmentation is enhancing the ground and the weather so it would produce more crops. That would certainly take care of many countries' poverty (well, maybe not, if I were to consider the possible natural diaster and exploitation of technology, which should affect some countries' involvement in wars. Gargh! I better do some research on exactly how advance of technology can affect society but still, I think there's more to what Augmentation can bring than just war.

"We see that your augmented crops and industry can produce this much, so therefore we demand that you pay us this much in reparations."

"But that's too high, you'll be bleeding us dry."

"Fuck it. Tell someone who cares. And we expect the first shipment tomorrow. 'K?"

And don't underestimate the power of greed and lack of foresight. Apparently we already produce enough food around the world to give everyone sufficient food - yet we still have famines and those planes are taking lobsters to grace rich people's tables, not food for starving tribesfolk.

Famine and recession/depression can happen in the midst of affluence.

It seems the more some places produce, the more the people there want. Is there an upper limit on what Augmenters can do to improve crops etc? How big a natural disaster can they compensate for?

And no matter how much food or technology you have, these people are going to hate those people and then you get someone assassinating an Arch-Duke and trumpets being sounded.

Rather than having to do in-depth studies into the political and sociological issues that created such events as the Great Depression and the World Wars, the Cold War and the eventual fall of Communism in Easter Europe, just assume that those pressures still exist unaffected by the presence of Augmentation - which is nigh universal (as the world's technology was in our world - improved technology didn't do a lot to prevent any of it, either).

edited 10th Jun '11 2:04:46 AM by Wolf1066

...*sighs* I suppose that makes sense. So would it be all right to have the setting just pretty much the same as we live in now? What I'm worrying is that it wouldn't make sense for some scientists to make same discovery at the same time, because Augmentation IS part of science after all and helped advance it. Maybe I can make some of the historical figures as Augmenters?

edited 10th Jun '11 3:28:31 AM by dRoy

It's perfectly all right to have your setting however the hell you like - and the readers can just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Having some of the historical figures as Augmenters would indeed work. Also consider that it has taken ages for our technology to get where it is and Augmentation science would probably take just as long.

Many factors can contribute to there not being fantastic leaps of technology up to the present age even with Augmenters around to theoretically make things better.

Sociological, religious and political reasons have all played their part in delaying technology in our own history, there's no reason they wouldn't do the same in your world.

In order for Augmentation to aid other sciences, the right Augmenter has to work with the right things from the other sciences and there are many reasons why that would not happen earlier - the other stuff may not yet exist (imagine if da Vinci had access to some of the materials that weren't developed until much later) and when it does exist, the person who could have used it is dead - nothing happens until some modern Augmenter looks at the historical work and what's around and says "hold on a minute..."

The Augmenter could be separated by distance - and in a hostile nation. The work could be Classified by the respective governments. There could be a lot of rivalry between the scientists in the various fields (think Edison and Tesla - and they're not the only ones who've had that problem).

Cross-fertilisation between different fields typically takes years or decades - it has with our current fields of research, now add another field...

We put people on the moon in 1969. We've done fuck all since then - politics, budgets, other priorities.

You could very easily have it so that it's not until the later part of the twentieth century that things really start coming together as far as Augmentation of other fields.

And then things could take off to the point where you have your mile-high towers, space weapons and "beanstalk" by 2030.

That would leave history as we know it pretty much intact with a few minor details changed and a few extra minor inventions that have helped a bit (maybe nuclear fusion was invented around 1995 due to Augmented nuclear physics) but haven't altered the world too much.

edited 10th Jun '11 3:59:43 AM by Wolf1066

Okay...that's a bit complicated for my brain but I think I get it. Thanks! You really seems to be knowledgeable in sociology, as far as I know (since I don't have much experience in that field, I don't know the degree of understanding you displayed is considered well informed or not), no?

For the record, the audience will only notice glaring problems if you point them out, for things like this.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief about Like Reality, Unless Noted and all that.

So, if you do delve into this, my advice is to never bring it center stage.

edited 10th Jun '11 4:14:02 AM by MrAHR

I see. But what if I write a history of major breathrough discoveries in the field of Augmentation? Would that have to not to conflict with the main science history?

I read a lot of history, especially interested in the history of technology. After a while it becomes pretty obvious that we could have done a lot more by now if the right people had been able to get together or if certain people didn't waste time in pissing contests or if organisations with a vested interest in control hadn't outlawed the knowledge and penalised the scientists, or those with the funds had not decided they'd be better spent elsewhere.

Realising that, it becomes easy to see how it could affect your universe in the same way.

That depends on what breakthroughs they had. If you make some of the historical figures Augmenters and their breakthroughs being handled using that science rather than the real world one, it wouldn't change a lot. If you do make earth-shattering breakthroughs very early, it would indeed change things out of whack but it wouldn't change so much if our agricultural development relied on Augmentation instead of technology (irrigation equipment) and chemistry (herbi-pesti-cides and fertilisers) and developed at the same era and rate as we developed our technology-based agriculture.

That explains a lot. :D

I actually posted something like that in World Building. Here's some of the samples of fictional history of Augmentation and can you look it and critique on it?

edited 10th Jun '11 4:36:34 AM by dRoy

Done. It's looking good.

I heartily recommend you read Gail Carriger's "Parasol Protectorate" stories. Hers is a steampunkesque Victorian England With Zeppelins - and ghosts, werewolves and vampires.

She's rewritten history in terms of the effect that these immortal creatures have had - she takes things like the Renaissance and fashions, customs and such and attributes them to the influence of one or other of these entities.

The events as we know them occurred, but the reason they occurred is different from our universe.

In this way you can see that yes, they've been there all along; yes, they've had their effect and no, their effect has not changed the world a lot (until you get up to the Victorian Era and a few early developments of technology have made a few changes).

You've done a great job so far embedding the development of Augmentation into the history of your world.

Ah, thanks for the suggestion. I will.

In a bit less related to note, you saw the basic Augmentation (I'm glad you liked the name) system and which element do you suppose teleportation or body hardening fit? I guess for body, I might say combination of earth and water because that's pretty much how human bones and muscle structure is made of, as far as I know. The former...I have no clue.

Oh, and about the books, is each volume over 400 pages, because I have a trouble reading novels longer than that. =_=

edited 10th Jun '11 5:53:57 AM by dRoy

Here's another aspect to consider: new discoveries tend to come from two sources: people working to find a solution to <this> problem (practical discoveries) and people monkeying around with no particular goal in mind, just trying to see what happens if they do <this> to <that> (theoretical discoveries). Theoretical discoveries are useless — interesting, but useless — until someone finds a practical way to use them. You can have all the Theoretical Augmentations you want; the only ones that will seriously affect the development of your society are the ones that have been made into Practical Augmentations.

edited 10th Jun '11 12:34:29 PM by Madrugada

Ah of course. Well, I posted something about it in my 12th post so maybe you can go check it out and see if it makes sense. It is used practically. Still, I can't really think of anyway that anyone can actually prove anythng mentioned in that post via scientific method...