What if history scenarios
- Thread starter chargers 09
- Start date
- Tagged users None
- Moderator
- #602
Irrespective of that, there is no doubt Charles would have still succeeded to the throne of England in 1997.
I doubt it will be much of a problem.
Last edited:
- Moderator
- #603
There wouldn't have been anyway.
A Market Opinion and Research International Poll published in December 1997 in London's Times newspaper found that Charles' popularity actually rose after Diana's death on August 31st 1997.
- Nov 10, 2022
- 12,898
- 10,408
- AFL Club
- Hawthorn
The whole thing is a tragedy, but titanic now claiming a few more multi millionaires after most of them escaped in the original tragedy, leaving the lower classes with slim chances.
Seems quite ironic
Seems quite ironic
- Nov 10, 2022
- 12,898
- 10,408
- AFL Club
- Hawthorn
He was seen as alone among the adult royals as giving a toss about the tragedy.
do_i_look_worried_go_ahe
Cancelled
- Oct 9, 2021
- 199
- 65
- AFL Club
- GWS
FDR dies on 12 April 1944, instead?
What changes:
Later in the real 1944, Wallace toured the USSR. He was taken to GULAG camps in Siberia, which were "sanitized" for his visits (he was told all the inmates were volunteers) and came away saying the camps were "a combination TVA and Hudson's Bay Company".
President Wallace is not going to make that tour. So perhaps he will not be as deluded about the USSR as he was in real life.
This will help him to get the nomination for President. As a sitting President, with Roosevelt's implied endorsement, I don't think he could be stopped. In the real 1944 he was the favorite among rank-and-file delegates for the 1944 VP nomination; it was only by Roosevelt's forceful behind-the-scenes intervention that Truman was nominated instead. Roosevelt acted under pressure from several important party leaders.
They in turn were moved in part by Wallace's apparent excessive fondness for the USSR. If that is removed, he's surely going to win the nomination.
But can he win in November? I don't think so. He's not Roosevelt, and he's got a huge vulnerability - his "Dear Guru" letters to the expatriate Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich. The Republicans had the letters. In 1940, they were deterred from using them by Democrat threats to reveal Wendell Willkie's adulterous affair with Irita Van Doren. But in 1944, the Democrats have no such counter.
So it's quite likely that Dewey is elected and becomes President in January 1945. Dewey at the alternate Yalta and Potsdam?
What changes:
Later in the real 1944, Wallace toured the USSR. He was taken to GULAG camps in Siberia, which were "sanitized" for his visits (he was told all the inmates were volunteers) and came away saying the camps were "a combination TVA and Hudson's Bay Company".
President Wallace is not going to make that tour. So perhaps he will not be as deluded about the USSR as he was in real life.
This will help him to get the nomination for President. As a sitting President, with Roosevelt's implied endorsement, I don't think he could be stopped. In the real 1944 he was the favorite among rank-and-file delegates for the 1944 VP nomination; it was only by Roosevelt's forceful behind-the-scenes intervention that Truman was nominated instead. Roosevelt acted under pressure from several important party leaders.
They in turn were moved in part by Wallace's apparent excessive fondness for the USSR. If that is removed, he's surely going to win the nomination.
But can he win in November? I don't think so. He's not Roosevelt, and he's got a huge vulnerability - his "Dear Guru" letters to the expatriate Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich. The Republicans had the letters. In 1940, they were deterred from using them by Democrat threats to reveal Wendell Willkie's adulterous affair with Irita Van Doren. But in 1944, the Democrats have no such counter.
So it's quite likely that Dewey is elected and becomes President in January 1945. Dewey at the alternate Yalta and Potsdam?
do_i_look_worried_go_ahe
Cancelled
- Oct 9, 2021
- 199
- 65
- AFL Club
- GWS
I 've known a speaking dinosaur, its called a pink and grey galah!!!
- Nov 10, 2022
- 12,898
- 10,408
- AFL Club
- Hawthorn
Im sure there is a technical reason, but I downloaded the cook picture to iphone and it was filed under 1770
Billions of years ago, a Mars sized body collided with Earth and the resultant debris formed our moon. If that body hit the Earth minutes either side, it would have collided differently and more or less debris would have affected the moon's size, rotational speed and distance from Earth...
The moon currently spins once on its axis in the exact time it revolves around the Earth, meaning the same part always faces the planet. The craters form a rough image of a face, and since the dawn of time humans have observed this and formed ancient legends...the Viking explained eclipses as the wolf Fenrir devouring the sun or moon, and the image of the moon has had fairly common representation as a human, my favourite being the early From The Earth To The Moon 130 years ago showing an annoyed moon with a bullet spaceship jammed in its face...!
If the impact was different, the most likely outcome is the moon would have had rotations which wouldn't have been identical, meaning you would see a globe rotating on its axis over time. Right here would be a crossroads in human history. Humans wouldn't have seen a disc, they would have seen a 3D ball, and notions of stars being holes in a giant upturned bowl or Fenrir or a flat earth would have been dispelled, not just in the Greek times but possibly with the first caveman who held an apple on a dark night next to a fire , saw a half lit ball in his hand as well as one in the night sky, and then put two and two together...
Every single society on earth would have reached the same conclusion, that bodies in the sky are globes, solid objects, and smaller lights aren't necessarily smaller, they are probably just further away. Every single religion would have been written differently, and world exploration would have gone in completely different directions with societies knowing they would end up back home and not falling off the edge...
This is the single biggest what if humans have ever experienced...!
The moon currently spins once on its axis in the exact time it revolves around the Earth, meaning the same part always faces the planet. The craters form a rough image of a face, and since the dawn of time humans have observed this and formed ancient legends...the Viking explained eclipses as the wolf Fenrir devouring the sun or moon, and the image of the moon has had fairly common representation as a human, my favourite being the early From The Earth To The Moon 130 years ago showing an annoyed moon with a bullet spaceship jammed in its face...!
If the impact was different, the most likely outcome is the moon would have had rotations which wouldn't have been identical, meaning you would see a globe rotating on its axis over time. Right here would be a crossroads in human history. Humans wouldn't have seen a disc, they would have seen a 3D ball, and notions of stars being holes in a giant upturned bowl or Fenrir or a flat earth would have been dispelled, not just in the Greek times but possibly with the first caveman who held an apple on a dark night next to a fire , saw a half lit ball in his hand as well as one in the night sky, and then put two and two together...
Every single society on earth would have reached the same conclusion, that bodies in the sky are globes, solid objects, and smaller lights aren't necessarily smaller, they are probably just further away. Every single religion would have been written differently, and world exploration would have gone in completely different directions with societies knowing they would end up back home and not falling off the edge...
This is the single biggest what if humans have ever experienced...!
- Sep 21, 2004
- 39,843
- 30,042
- AFL Club
- West Coast
- Other Teams
- Norwood & Liverpool.
Cavemen ate fruit. They lit fires at night and dismembered the remaining parts of the gazelle they killed and turned them into weapons, jumpers, bait and musical instruments (ever wondered where the term catgut violin strings came from? There's a distant origins story)...
Not much else to do around a campfire than play around with what you see, especially when you haven't invented language yet. A caveman holds an orange up to that light and it looks like a crescent. Beats the hell out of me why no one seems to have worked this out according to actual history (great stories about Greeks hearing about where a shadow falls a thousand k's north), but drawing comparisons between a lit globe in your hand and then the lit globe in the sky would be easier if the moon was rotating...
Not much else to do around a campfire than play around with what you see, especially when you haven't invented language yet. A caveman holds an orange up to that light and it looks like a crescent. Beats the hell out of me why no one seems to have worked this out according to actual history (great stories about Greeks hearing about where a shadow falls a thousand k's north), but drawing comparisons between a lit globe in your hand and then the lit globe in the sky would be easier if the moon was rotating...
If that one instant you describe had happened, and changed many things, is why I believe hopefully there is much to much distance for anything from other worlds moons whatever, to reach here?
Simply because your comment is true one split of a split of a second of a billion years old instance, makes everything either like we are now, or the different scenario, you described, makes earth very different
Suggests to me that those who want to see aliens , perhaps should hope they never do.
Those who believe in the UFO game, should perhaps hope nothing ever does reach here, if we are way way off in a quiet part of the now universe are we safer?
Because what may come here will be nothing what so ever, like us.
To me that's a little frightening. It could be a microscopic life form that kills us all off, it could be harmless.
It will never be anything like we are.
Because the odds of the collision between an earth and a "mars" like object somewhere else, colliding, at exactly the same time and exactly the same manner, are impossible.
I hope we are alone, or whatever maybe, is very very far away? Too far away to get here.
This is one of my favourite absolutely pointless but fascinating time wasting topics...!
4 billion years of life struggling to grow on this rock, and all it would take is one reaction in the sun to produce a super sized solar flare that hits the Earth and that's it, the planet is sterilised in minutes like a needle and a lighter...
Aliens...forget ET, it would be WOTW or ID4. Every time a superior force has "come in peace and for trade" to a place they could beat, it has never ended well for the locals. Even the most magnanimous incursions have eventually ripped off the visited. Why are we sending out probes with plaques? Public sentiment is saying "hello", science is saying "let's see what's out there", but the leadership paying the bills is saying "let's see what's in it for us"...so if we get visited, I'd guarantee they are looking for what they can take. As you say, microscopic life forms...the Spaniards brought chicken pox and wiped out thousands...
And that disparity in viewpoint could be as wide as the difference between the total lack of emotion we have eating a steak and the point of view of the bovine we killed to get it! Imagine visitors so apart from us that they consider us as complicated as an ant colony, something we play with as kids or spray or run over nonchalantly with a mower as adults, and would just do as they want...round up humans, kill them off, chop them up and put them in alien sardine cans, or other fairly brutal processing methods because humans make a great fertiliser for some alien pensioner's garden. If I need to kill nutgrass, I use Sempra, an expensive but supremely effective weed killer that leaves everything around it...so forget WOTW and expensive weaponry, if you've been studying humans through observation and anal probes for long enough, you'd quickly figure out what "sempras" a human and just spray from orbit...again, I do this in the morning and I've totally forgotten about my act of mass genocide by brunch...! What if covid was a half-arsed alien chore to weed the garden...?
Some say "yeah, but aliens might be different"...thing is, aliens are life, and life follows a few fundamental rules everywhere, unless it truly is not "life as we know it" (and if it's that, there's not much hope for common ground!). All organisms in our life definition consume each other, and the ones on top of our food chains are predators...you have to go a long way down the list to find a plant muncher! Predators combine, strategize, practice stealth...and then later they build tools, write symphonies, and build spaceships to find other things to exploit. If ET arrives, sure, there'll be a Joseph Banks digging up weeds, the one Elliott ran into, but I'll bet his mates that rescued him at the end of the movie were military men and that ship was armed to the teeth...!
Scary . Stop looking , we might find something.
errant bounce
All Australian
- May 2, 2024
- 834
- 1,310
- AFL Club
- Fremantle
- Other Teams
- South Fremantle
How is that ironic?
People cant even agree on what has happened. How are we going to agree on what could of happened?
Everything is different .They may not want to farm and eat us. They might not recognise greed, they might not even exist. Or come to "TAKE", like humas do.
I don't believe there is anything out there anything like us.
So microscopic death could visit from somewhere else, I think we should just survive on our planet by ourselves, stop hunting impossibilities or we might find what we don't want to.
What about a deadly pandemic from some visitors or from something our astronauts bring back.
that was a definite killer, make Covid look like a picnic?
I think close space developement if we have to. For satellites and communication, but stay close, don't interfere with what we don't know about.
And if some critters want to farm us
Or, say poison us then we can sing Louis the fly
Dogs_R_Us
Space Traveller
Anyone watch the TV series “V”?
Who knows! Consider this though - famous brains, and others not so famous but fairly renowned in scientific circles, are consistent in stating that if the conditions exist elsewhere, then the same types of processes could occur. So even if the grouping of compounds to form DNA in carbon based life forms is a one in a zillion chance, then there are zillions of worlds out there for the chance to reoccur! Science is telling us that forms of life could exist in alternative compounds (e.g. silicon gets a regular mention), and then of course we need to consider we don't know of combos that could also be out there. And then the question could be what is life itself? As we discover or hypothesise other possibilities, we move further into and beyond Spock's "it's life Jim but not as we know it" notion...
This all can be summarised in one fairly frightening realisation - if life capable of reaching us is out there, and it's like us, then two fundamentals have to come into play, including the need to eat and replenish in what would surely be a predatory hierarchy. 1) Science says if it's organic, it needs to eat, and if that doesn't mean directly eat us (V or WOTW), then it might mean we have something of value and need us out of the way (ID4) or subjugated (anyone ever read Harry Turtledove's WW In The Balance series?). Our own history constantly says if we get rejected the first time we ask nicely for another culture to share, we'll simply take it if we can...it's a bigger stretch to think ET is looking out for us ahead of their own survival rather than the other way around! And the elements here are the same as the elements out there, meaning we've been predicting things for a century that keep coming true as gfar as we can see into the universe...you might want to challenge your own belief!
The other fundamental is if life is not like us, throwing all of our morals and principles out the window - hell, right now, we might be co-existing with something else and have utterly no clue it's even there! If we don't understand it, there's every chance they won't understand us and our existence either, and that is a massive gulf to close. Spock's words become moot - we don't even know that it's life. A few ST episodes delve into this notion, where humans in good faith blast rocks or drain water or go about their industrial space business not realising they are killing another species until that species manages to communicate their plight, and then ST's Prime Directive and all that save the day...thing is, that realisation and ability to communicate might be the most far fetched thing in that story! We don't know what consciousness and sentience really are either, to be honest. And what if another life form is actually made of it - thought beings? Our pitiful little impulses might not even register, just like we don't look at mould in the bathroom and think "ooh, life...must apply basic moral principles and respect it!"...
Dogs_R_Us
Space Traveller
Recommend The Eerie Silence , by Paul Davies.
As far as we can see in the universe?
This is what I don't get,
Isn't space and distance about time.
What we see maybe is, what we think we see but
not around anymore.
Because of the time light takes to travel to a receiver
a telescope of the highest order?
If we see a super nova from a massively barely imaginable
distance to this telescope, today , doesn't this mean that
the light is from a happening perhaps billions of years ago
and the place is non existent, now.
Don't we have about 9 billion years we know nothing of and
four billion years since we began to cool, that we even existed.
So we assume that the 13 billion years old Universe(s) from
big-bang, up to our earths existence the 9 billion in front of us ,
well may not even exist as what we think it does because
of time it takes for light to reach here, our telescope.
Very hard to fathom I am not a scientist , but I read that
13 billion years is estimated as the big bang time and 4 billion
was when we began to cool , so the next 9 billion years
we assume there are things in front of us further away from
where we are right now, but the light travelling time could
mean anything . There maybe nothing but light reflection out
there and maybe 9 billion years never existed.Until we decided
to try to count them?
Or what we actually can prove or feel as real, like unmanned space craft
sent to planets inside this solar system, closer enough region could
be really the only thing we actually see as anything but light.
Although Spock and Kirk actually found the original probe I think The Voyager?
If that is still going , it would have travelled a fraction of the fractions of
universal distance, because what has it been? 60 years traveling?
When billions of billions of years past we get light images , maybe there is
nothing out there at all.
No aliens but there may be germs we should not be searching for.
If you can understand all that, your doing better than me, because
I can barely work out what I'm talking about.
But its distance and time , I think.
Maybe we don't really know what we are looking at. Through a
telescope at light from trillions of years past?
Pretty much spot on! Our science, however, is based upon the assumption that what we see is what we get...by the time the light reaches us, it's a record of what happened when it first started its journey, and the real mindfuk happens when we realise that what we see right now in the sky isn't consistent as it sits there apparently right in front of us. For example, Sirius is 8 light years away, and Canopus, a big star just to the right, is 310...look at Canopus tonight, and what you're seeing is what it looked like in 1714...Sirius is 2016...so if you're watching the 2016 GF on a planet orbiting Sirius and don't wish to know the score, look away now...!
Scientists are arguing over what Betelgeuse looks like right now, because it's showing all the signs of imminently going supernova and it's 400-600 light years away (that instability is one of the reasons they can't quite nail the distance)...so according to the theories there is every chance that right now that star doesn't even exist, it's a huge splattered mess, and we won't see it happen for centuries...!
The universe's age was calculated via red shift, which is what happens to light when something is moving away. When you hear an ambulance go past, the nee-ner nee-ner siren sound gets lower in pitch as it moves away because the sound waves are being stretched longer, lower frequency...same principle with light, except longer wave lengths are the red end of the spectrum. Scientists calculated a point where the red shifted objects, mostly stars, seemed to be moving away from, and estimated the time the stars had been travelling, leading a) to an age for the universe and b) the idea of the Big Bang, the point where it all began...
So while it all points to something amazingly complex, the techniques used to come up with the theories are quite simple, just basic triangulation and physics. What does tend to happen is a new can of worms opens up with every new hypothesis, but the answers to old questions tend to slot into the answers for the new ones more often than they don't...it might be as unachievable ultimately as a spider understanding the workings of the hybrid motor it's made a home of in your car, but we are going in the right direction...
Scientists are arguing over what Betelgeuse looks like right now, because it's showing all the signs of imminently going supernova and it's 400-600 light years away (that instability is one of the reasons they can't quite nail the distance)...so according to the theories there is every chance that right now that star doesn't even exist, it's a huge splattered mess, and we won't see it happen for centuries...!
The universe's age was calculated via red shift, which is what happens to light when something is moving away. When you hear an ambulance go past, the nee-ner nee-ner siren sound gets lower in pitch as it moves away because the sound waves are being stretched longer, lower frequency...same principle with light, except longer wave lengths are the red end of the spectrum. Scientists calculated a point where the red shifted objects, mostly stars, seemed to be moving away from, and estimated the time the stars had been travelling, leading a) to an age for the universe and b) the idea of the Big Bang, the point where it all began...
So while it all points to something amazingly complex, the techniques used to come up with the theories are quite simple, just basic triangulation and physics. What does tend to happen is a new can of worms opens up with every new hypothesis, but the answers to old questions tend to slot into the answers for the new ones more often than they don't...it might be as unachievable ultimately as a spider understanding the workings of the hybrid motor it's made a home of in your car, but we are going in the right direction...
Last edited:
Dogs_R_Us
Space Traveller
What a great answer
What a great answer, thank you for that, it is always fascinating.
