Jump to content

If You Could Change History


GAROVORKIN

Recommended Posts

20 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Hope it's better than it Wiki page suggests.

It's flawed for sure. Card's Sci-fi is typically pretty light on the sci, so if you're a stickler for that, you'll probably want to stay away. The plan as to how these folks were going to turn around a post apocalyptic earth was the bit that sold me. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Avoid the great schism and especially the 4th Crusade that made Byzantium ripe for taking. Allied Western Europe + Byzantium would keep the Arabs and later the rising Ottomans at bay, secure the position in Palestine the first Crusades had established, maybe even expand to the middle East, at least keep a balance of power and trade routes open. So there would have been no need to find a Western route to India and the American civilizations get some more time to develop. (I still fear that the factors mentioned in Guns, Gunpowder and Steel would have stalled the development of the American cultures in any case.)

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

3 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

I think that's a valid angle given the open ended nature of the question as it was posed. What personal history would you correct?

 

If I cannot meet my past self, have somebody else nudge me at 17 years old in high school (2002) telling him 'Ask that girl on a date or you'll regret it for the rest of your life!'

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'd (somehow) track down the first spillover of smallpox into humanity. It has probably been the world's biggest killer ever. It shredded the Persian, Roman and Chinese empires, disproportionately harming the poorest people whose starving bodies couldn't cope with immunity.

It stifled human population growth at a time that coincided with increasing resource usage - a population that grew faster would have realised, much sooner than we now have, the importance of limiting resource usage. It would have forced our hands earlier to truly save the planet.

We have now eradicated it entirely with vaccines, but we'd have been better off without it at all.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'd stop the creation of Yugoslavia after the WWI. That just hasn't worked out well for anyone involved.

It's pretty safe to say that a separate countries (borders would have to be quite different, and there probably wouldn't be as many as there are today) would've worked out much better and avoid all kinds of issues that came out of forcing those countries into one.

EDIT:

Technically, it wasn't called Yugoslavia immediately after WWI, I'm well aware of that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 8/25/2017 at 5:38 AM, baxus said:

I'd stop the creation of Yugoslavia after the WWI. That just hasn't worked out well for anyone involved.

It's pretty safe to say that a separate countries (borders would have to be quite different, and there probably wouldn't be as many as there are today) would've worked out much better and avoid all kinds of issues that came out of forcing those countries into one.

EDIT:

Technically, it wasn't called Yugoslavia immediately after WWI, I'm well aware of that.

Marshall Tito managed to hold the place together. Afterwards , all bets were off.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you want to advance human progress, I think the Greeks could theoretically have created full size steam engines of some kind, and had at least some kind of early industrial revolution, thousands of years before the actual one. We might be living in space colonies by now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, GAROVORKIN said:

Marshall Tito managed to hold the place together. Afterwards , all bets were off.

The way he "managed to hold the place together" is a huge part of the problem. He did get the whole "benevolent dictator" thing to a whole new level, so people often forget that he was still a dictator.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Theda Baratheon said:

I want to find some way of ensuring women had equal opportunity in education as men. An equal amount of female authors, inventers and scientists right from the start ...we would be in genuine space by now tbh 

I don't know how utopian we're supposed to be with this, but what about universal education and opportunity? I mean how many great advancements came from the top 1%, purely because they were the only ones who had the resources to make them? How many potential Einstein's have been subsistance farmers?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The problem with stopping the First World War is twofold:

  • Even if you stop the Assassination, and have Willy fall down the stairs, something like it was coming anyway. It might not have been the War we know, but it was coming - the nature of Great Power politics saw to that.
  • The First World War created the modern world. You basically short-circuit the twentieth century, with all that entails. A whole heap of authoritarian, imperialist ideologies that are no longer viable would remain viable, while things like votes for the working class and women's suffrage would take much longer to achieve. Fancy a British Empire lasting much longer, Tsarist Russia pushing its antisemitic agenda, and a Catholic Church that hasn't been de-fanged? Fancy the Great Powers stumbling across nuclear weapons without the experience of 1914-1945? 
Link to comment
Share on other sites

30 minutes ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

The problem with stopping the First World War is twofold:

  • Even if you stop the Assassination, and have Willy fall down the stairs, something like it was coming anyway. It might not have been the War we know, but it was coming - the nature of Great Power politics saw to that.
  • The First World War created the modern world. You basically short-circuit the twentieth century, with all that entails. A whole heap of authoritarian, imperialist ideologies that are no longer viable would remain viable, while things like votes for the working class and women's suffrage would take much longer to achieve. Fancy a British Empire lasting much longer, Tsarist Russia pushing its antisemitic agenda, and a Catholic Church that hasn't been de-fanged? 

It did create the modern world , but the the first world war and its aftermath laid  the ground for work for even worse horrors  second World War and the Holocaust, Stalin , Mao, The Cold War  and all the money and technology that went into the building of weapons that could wipe out the world dozens of time over.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 8/27/2017 at 8:36 AM, Red Tiger said:

Stopping that assassination would change nothing. The war (like any other) was about money and people would have just found another excuse to start it.

Sadly true,.  it would have delayed the war for  a few years, which means that more technically advanced weapons would have been employed  which would have meant even more causalities.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...