Alternate history scenarios, ideas, general questions and miscellaneous points

Fair enough.

Yeah, that's one thing many works never look into is that an AI brain is a million times more complex than, say a pocket calculator, and yet in the 30s and 40s works with A.I.s, pocket calculators are rarely seen.

So obviously technology hit a quantum leap. I'd say Positronic sort of idea, there would also have to be purpose in designing a robot back then.

Shall I make a separate thread to discuss this further?

Actually this is the right thread.

That would depend on which areas technology has surged ahead. Is it just robotics and AI? How far back does your point of divergence go to allow the development of the robots? Thousands of years ago, hundreds?

edited 15th Jun '17 9:20:00 PM by Matm

Got a question about the following scenario.

In a timeline I'm making there are two sides having a Cold War. It's not between Communists and Capitalists but based on 2 emerging cultural groups and their allies (right now let's call them by placeholder names A and B). There are only 2 superpowers in that world, one for each side. At one particular point in the story the superpower for side B collapses in a citizen revolt and fragments into several nations, most of which are loyal to side A. Following this other nations on side B either defect to side A or collapse as well. This leaves 5 nations occupying the Australian landmass as the only remaining nations for side B. Side B has completely stopped any travel or trade to Australia until it agrees to join side B and begin following it's rules and regulations.

The nations on the Australian landmass had access to fusion power (about half as expensive per joule as nuclear power today), humanoid robots and general AI that has enough complexity to understand any task a 5 year old child could. The robots cost 4/5 what it costs to employ a human but need to be created, maintained and repaired by humans. Seeing that there's no chance to win this Cold War and knowing that they could potentially stay isolated forever would it be plausible for such nations to capitulate?

edited 17th Jun '17 12:19:27 AM by Matm

How badly weakened would the 1900's pre WW 1 United States be if a Tunguska Event sized asteroid struck Indiana? How badly compromised would the country's ability to defend itself be if two of the empires of the time decided to take advantage of the situation and invaded immediately afterward?

If you're wondering this situation is an analogy to different countries in my alternate timeline to provide a point of reference. As you may have guessed from the Tunguska reference the nation is in Siberia (between the Ob and Lena rivers), the area hit is as important to agricultural production in that nation as Indiana is to the USA. The nations invading are an alternate Russia and an empire occupying Kamchatka, parts of North America, Japan and parts of South East Asia that's roughly equal to Russia strength and industrial capacity.

edited 19th Jun '17 11:16:24 PM by zepv

Not a whole lot. Most of the industrial centers are in the neighboring states and the Tunguska event really only flattened 2000 square kilometers. That's enough to take a chunk out of Indiana but not enough to start spilling onto the neighboring states. Yes, there'd be damage but the only thing at risk would be some farmland and the Mississippi River.

About the robotics surge. I'd say mid 1800s when the technologies experience their first leap with better electrical storage, which leads to sciences developing around electrical ability. That's the early days where the robots are simple and crude. Just barely getting off the ground.

Better batteries does nothing about the control necessary to make a robot more than a bit of clockwork.

Okay, what do you think would affect the development of robotics? Because I know a boon in electrical power making it more practical would encourage more sciences around the development of electricity.

Well really what you want to look at is the development of vacuum tubes, those are where you're going to get your control from. But I think even then, you're looking at a POD as far back, perhaps as the medieval period, before you can hit the sort of effect you're after, and even if you do, the world will seem very odd.

More viable might be earlier mechanical calculators. steam engines are possible at least as far back as the first century AD, so combine that with an actually well developed understanding of mechanics, and I could easily see some very simple mechanical robots centuries earlier.

I've looked at the history of automatons, quite old actually. Vacuum Tube development earlier on would be a good point, the electrical boom is just to justify why these robots are powered by electricity. A computer brain is easier to justify than a clock brain.

I know about Steam engines as well so there is at least a history there to justify mechanical knowledge.

How would European civilization be affected if the black death and the Mongol invasions never happened?

Prior to the Mongol invasion which of the Eastern European nations was most likely to revive the Kievan Rus? How high would the probability of Ukraine achieving this feat be? How about Lithuania or Poland?

@ #131 and #132: One alternate I have is the Tunguska object hitting, not Indiana but St. Petersburg. Remember that at the time it, not Moscow was the center of government. It's also where Russia kept it's Baltic Fleet. I see both revolutionaries and Germany moving in to fill the gap. I checked btw and neither Lenin, Stalin or Trotsky were anywhere in the area at the time. Neither interestingly was Rasputin which might bring in a third faction because Russia was still highly religious and undereducated at the time so I'm sure that multitudes would see this as some kind of sign from God.

Another idea I've had that probably wouldn't work as a novel but maybe as a collection of stories is what if various authors that died young (lets say 45 and under) lived into say their seventies. How would they and their writing be influenced by event? How might they effect events in and out of whatever genre they wrote in? Dibs on Robert E. Howard!

Those both seem like pretty cool settings Curious to see how those turn out.

This might seem like a rather random question but what units are used in your timelines?

Mine still uses meters for distance, since that's based on a factor of ten of the earth's circumference and the name relates to measuring something. Kuài is used as a unit of weight which is based on the mass of 1 x 10^23 hydrogen atoms so no standard weight is needed to define it. The measurement of time is decimal time.

In your opinion, is this going to unduly confuse the reader/ watcher?

Would it be plausible for this situation not to end in a nuclear holocaust?

In my timeline we have a conflict between the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South America and the Indigenous peoples of South America. The colonies have separated from Spain and Portugal and have unified into a single state. It is unstable and rebellions by Indigenous peoples across the state are on the verge of causing its collapse, with areas of South America becoming inaccessible to police or the military. This nation has nuclear weapons.

In a way the state could be considered this timeline's equivalent of Nazi Germany with certain Indigenous populations being targeted for extermination. They have no allies in the international community. The prospect of South America reverting to Indigenous rule is highly unpleasant to the colonists (just imagine WW 2 era Germans being forced to live under a Jewish state).

This universe's equivalent to the UN, Indra has informed them that any deployment of WM Ds against South America's Indigenous people will be regarded as an attack against Indra and will be met with "proportional retaliation". Anti Ballistic missile systems from nations across the world are being deployed around South America's coastline, ready to intercept any nuclear launches.

Towards the end of the state a rebel rises to prominence who kills many of the colonists who refuse to bow to her rule, civilian or military. There are several rebel factions who fight each other even as they fight the state.

Would it be plausible that none of the state's nuclear weapons fall into the hands of the rebels? Perhaps all the weapons in a particular facility are scuttled before the rebels can get their hands on them? Might the state refrain from launching any nukes if it's last city is about to fall?

edited 20th Jul '17 3:32:22 AM by Matm

In an alternate timeline America was able to build V2 rockets by the time WW 2 started. When the space race starts how much sooner than our world would the moon landing be able to happen?

edited 24th Jul '17 1:57:06 AM by zepv

No different from our world, I'd wager. ICBM capability (= space rocketry) doesn't make much sense or have much political value without the matching presence of nuclear weapons, which is a track of science distinct from rocketry. Remember, the space race was born and raised on tech meant to erase r=4km worth of enemy territory at a time.

It's not the "what" here that counts, it's the "who". The USA didn't have rockets in WWII IRL because Goddard was functionally the only person really researching them. But get him, von Braun, Korolev, Oberth, and a big-ass money bin of funding together in the same place at the same time... and that might be a good place to start.

Nuclear weapons are some of the most carefully restricted weapons every made, to the point that they're just metal tubes full of radioactivity and/or fuel if you don't have the means to activate one. So long as no one who knows the codes joins up with the rebels, it's plausible. (Because of this, the IRL worry isn't rogue nukes, but rogue nuclear contamination, e.g. "dirty bombs" or nuclear plant meltdown.)

It also makes no sense for a state to nuke their own territory, as that would wipe out any infrastructure that might become useful again after hostilities have ceased. "Proportional retaliation" would also result in far too many deaths or displacements to be feasible, and really only barely starts to make sense in the context of mutually assured destruction (which your situation wouldn't be - Indra has no actual presence in the target area).

Plus, nuclear weapons (programs) are expensive to build and maintain. It's a waste of time and resources to use them on something petty, if conventional weapons would also work. No, environmental weapons like smog or fire are cheaper to activate and more difficult to stop, maybe in addition to Biological and Chemical weapons.

Thanks for the feedback. Good to know that we can plausibly avoid deployment of nuclear strikes in this story. Would it also be plausible that there would be no use of dirty bombs by the rebels? The personnel operating the nuclear facilities would be selected to be the most loyal and have the strongest disdain for the indigenous people of the nation. We've got an environment divided based on race and the concept of "Race Loyalty" hammered into the ruling minority of the state since they were children (those of Spanish or Portuguese descent).

As for why Indra is so interested in the state in South America (Acedo). The setting follows that timeline's World War. Acedo was part of the faction that fought against the Indra (Vör) and lost. The war lasted for decades, bringing economic ruin and civil war to countries on both sides. Acedo managed to recover whilst many of the nations of Indra were still incapacitated and conquered the other nations of South America, most of which were Indra members in the last war. When Indra recovers Acedo has taken South America. Indra is taking action to prevent the other nations of Vör from attempting similar expansionism and to protect what were once citizens of its member states.

Part of the official reason for the World War was the expansionism of Vör, its use of slavery and genocide. So Indra recovering, finding Acedo expanding across South America and massacring it's people is the equivalent of America having signed a peace treaty to end WW 2 after pushing Germany back into its original borders then suddenly finding the Nazis have reconquered Europe, have reopened the concentration camps and now have nukes. Does Indra's response still seem a bit extreme? Is there an alternative course of action they would likely take?

edited 26th Jul '17 1:55:32 AM by Matm

Nuclear fuel is... difficult to remove from a reactor. Something along the lines of the Goiânia accident would make more sense?

If the US signed a peace treaty with Nazi Germany, that would be a sign and result of greater isolationist sentiments in that public than existed IRL. (And the concentration camps became worldwide knowledge mostly after the war, not during.) Your scenario sounds more like a 'hot' version of the Cold War, albeit more generally between the East and the West instead of the USSR and USA.

Now, both sides having nuclear weapons and/or a willingness to consider using them isn't as important as an understanding of mutually assured destruction - if they don't have that, then nuclear weapons in that setting would probably just be considered an extremely powerful bomb rather than a stigmatizing world-ender. (The frightening thing IRL is some state somewhere deciding to ignore doctrine and attacking another nuclear power.) So one side in your setting being ready to use nukes and the other quickly agreeing to that kind of warfare is... extremely unsettling, in-universe.

The IRL alternate course was for both sides to accede to diplomatic resolution of their standoff. The more interesting solution is internal governmental collapse, and I'm specifically thinking of Romania at the end of 1989 here, but one nudged into action by spies.

I have a scenario where we have another Chinese led dynasty following the Ming which is roughly early Ming level in success and popular support. There is an Eight Nation Alliance in this alternate world which launches an invasion of China, cutting off access between the occupied territory and the rest of China. If the allies launched a prolonged propaganda campaign, restricted information access and tightly controlled the education system, how long would it be before the Chinese people in this territory would maintain their independence from China (fighting off violently any attempts to reunify the country), even after the allies lose control of the region? Would 30 years be long enough?

edited 27th Jul '17 2:27:28 AM by zepv

I've got a concept in my story called a "Raze Winter". In it there is so much soot and ash released by burning plants, biological matter and buildings that the sun is blocked out globally. It has the effects of a nuclear winter but is not caused by nuclear weapons. How long might such a event be able to last? When would be the earliest that such an event could happen in history? How long would humanity in the 1700's be able to plausibly hold out before they went extinct?

Depends on the era (specifically, if there's a fast way to get from one end of the countryside to the other, which affects logistics). 30 years is a whole generation, and would be long enough for a lot to happen. 5-10 years would also be enough.

It would... probably last for as long the ash and soot is being produced plus a year. The length would depend on what is doing the producing - the industrial stuff can be deactivated, but a wildfire across the whole Amazon or volcanic eruptions would take longer. Keep in mind here that we've had volcanic winters before, but nothing on the scale you're describing.

The industrial stuff, barring alternate history tech developments, is pretty unlikely to happen (there's just never been enough industry to create more than local smog, and minor but compounding climate effects).

I think humanity would have lasted a year at most if this happened in the 1700s, with pockets here and there lasting maybe two years. The biggest factor would be the lack of food - my history's not that great, but food preservation then meant surviving the winter months and a further 9 months beyond that would be fatal. Kill off enough plant life globally, and it'll work its way up the food chain pretty quickly.

Deus Deno, the ash and soot is from a global war. The two factions waging the war are attempting to annihilate each other and the war sees the mass deployment of incendiary devices. Forest fires and fires in farmland are seen as a weapon to cripple an enemy. In a spectacular feat of coordination, logistics and sheer bloody minded determination massive tracts of the enemy's vegetation are set alight. It turns out the enemy had the same idea which results in large tracts of the entire plant's vegetation being on fire.

In a case of Gone Horribly RIght the fires rage out of control. Neither side can stop them and soon most of the world's farmland and the cities themselves are ablaze. The coal and oil reserves of either side eventually go up in flames when the global conflagration eventually reaches them.