What Could Have Been/Real Life: Difference between revisions

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* This is, as can be seen below, the entire point of [[Alternate History]].

 

== Arts & Entertainment ==

* What if the Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers had been at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941?

** The losses of battleships would not have been as great because some of the firepower would have been directed at the carriers instead. The long term fallout would have been for the US to pursue a more balanced course of warfare<ref>not as carrier-centric</ref> in the Pacific that would have incorporated more and better AA capability over the fleets and more aggressive use of battleships. Japan would have eventually gotten the massive, climactic naval clash it constantly pursued for the first half of the war, but they would have faced off against a larger, combined fleet of more modern US battleships and carriers that would have still scheduled the Imperial Japanese for a date with Davy Jones, but the battleships would have done most of the heavy work to include sinking the IJN Yamato<ref>very much within the capabilities of the ''North Carolina'', ''South Dakota'' and ''Iowa'' class battleships</ref> and the rest of the Japanese heavy fleet. Also, we would have likely seen the deployment of the ''USS Montana'' class.

** Following the end of the war, the USN would have held onto her heavy-armored fleets and her big gun firepower. As thick, battleship armor is ''easily'' able to shrug off any non-nuclear anti-ship missile or cruise missile, this would also prevent the sea-skimming anti-ship missile from becoming the dominant weapon in modern naval warfare. With a little ingenuity and heavy investment in S/VTOL fighter technology, we could have seen [[The Battlestar]] 's sea-faring counterpart, AKA [[Military Mashup Machine|the battle-carrier]] become a serious reality.

* What would have happened to the Republic of Colombia if Jorge Eliecer Gaitan wouldn't have been killed off?.

** Or what would have happened if Luis Carlos Galán would have been assasinated too?.

* What if the Colombian Exchange never happened? And Eurasia and the Americas were permanently separated. True, we'd have much less of the goods that the two sides have exchanged, but we'd also have FAR fewer diseases.

* What if Stéphane Dion had succeeded in his plans to set up a Liberal-NDP-Bloc Quebecois government in Canada after the 2008 election? The Conservative PM, Stephen Harper had parliament suspended for two months in an attempt to ward off a vote of no confidence, and in the meantime Dion was forced out of the Liberal leadership and replaced with Michael Ignatieff, who promptly abandoned the coalition plan and announced that the Liberals could win the next election outright... only for the 2011 election to result in a handsome Conservative majority and the Liberals being ''slaughtered''. Had Dion held onto his position (or if Ignatieff had stuck with the coalition plan), then the last few years might have been very different for Canada.

 

 

* In both the book and the series ''Cosmos'', astronomer [[Carl Sagan]] expresses his regret and frustration about how science, after being born before 500 AD and flourishing, soon became an ivory-tower intellectual thing which did not get shared, didn't improve the lives of the people, and was swallowed and scorned by superstition. Science died for a thousand years with the burning of the Library of Alexandria, which in both the book and the series he mourns with a quiet, heartfelt intensity.

{{quote|"It was as if the entire civilization had undergone some self-inflicted brain surgery, and most of its memories, discoveries, and passions were extinguished irrevocably. The loss was incalculable. In some cases, we know only the tantalizing titles of the works that were destroyed. In most cases, we know neither the titles nor the authors. We do know that of the 123 plays of [[Sophocles]] in the Library, only seven survived. One of those seven is ''[[Oedipus the King|Oedipus Rex]]''. Similar numbers apply to the works of [[Aeschylus]] and [[Euripides]]. It is a little as if the only surviving works of a man named [[William Shakespeare]] were ''[[Coriolanus]]'' and ''[[The Winter's Tale|The Winters Tale]]'', but we had heard that he had written certain other plays, unknown to us but apparently prized in his time, works entitled ''[[Hamlet]]'', ''[[Macbeth]]'', ''[[Julius Caesar (theatre)|Julius Caesar]]'', ''[[King Lear]]'', ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]''."}}

** Darwin may be given too much credit (if that's possible?), but a large part of his fame is how he collated huge amounts of data before publishing. For example, he wrote about how "half an eye" could be useful, yet the canard comes up from time to time in creationist arguments.

* As part of the Apollo Program, at one point NASA was considering using the hardware to send the astronauts on a Venus flyby. The first manned interplanetary flight could have happened nearly '''40 years ago''' instead of--wait it hasn't happened yet, huh?

* Three Words: ''Dinosaurs. Never. Died.''

** They didn't. We still have birds.

*** [https://web.archive.org/web/20131104232556/http://www.sivatherium.narod.ru/library/Dixon_2/00_en.htm Here's something of interest.]

** If the Mesozoic extinction never happened, we would be small lemur-like animals, and the world would be populated by tiny, rabbit-sized sapient descendants of Troodontids. Think a small bird except with four wings, teeth, clawed hands, and a tail.

*** We would be living in fear of Gorgonopsids.

* This troper recalls reading about a What If? historical paper (which I unfortunately cannot recall the title of) which points out how the Ancient Greeks had invented a steam engine, and the Ancient Persians had a functional railway system for transporting goods. If the two had not been at war, or had stolen each other's technology, the course of nearly three thousand years of history could have been radically altered.

** Also, slavery back then was so cheap that nobody had any interest in using the steam engine for any practical uses. It was just an interesting bit of mechanics. What if slavery had been outlawed in ancient Greece?

* What if the Big Bang never happened...''at all?''

* Cracked.com's [http://www.cracked.com/article_19531_5-scientific-advances-that-should-have-changed-everything.html "5 Scientific Advances That Should Have Changed Everything"], which included:

** What if the electric car had retained the foothold it had during the early 20th century, rather than falling into obsolescence once oil was discovered in Texas, making internal combustion engines king?

** What if the U.S. government had taken Robert Goddard's rocket research seriously and fostered it, rather than ignoring it as nonsense? And what if that same government had taken Goddard more seriously when he told them that Nazi Germany was making serious inquiries into his rocket research (The government's reaction was basically "Fine! Let the Nazi play with their little rockets!")?

** What if [http://chemistry.mtu.edu/~pcharles/SCIHISTORY/HenryCavendish.html Henry Cavendish's] work was discovered an implimented in his time (He came up with his own versions of Richter's Law, Ohm's Law, Coulomb's Law, Charles's Law of Gases and Dalton's Law in the Eighteenth Century)? Or more to the point, what if Cavendish wasn't a paranoid recluse who actually shared his theories with ''anybody?''