Alternate History - The biggest change

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imho RedRalphWiggum raises a good point. Unless you pick a constraint to deal with the remoteness of long-deceased actors, then there is little point in what-if'ing human history in comparison to more recent ones.

So i say if comparisons are to be made, the 'impact' should be one century out after the divergence, and no 'total' events.

But 'biggest change whose differences would be observable after 100 years, assuming there is still a humanity left to comment on it'.

e.g. no dinos with opposable thumbs making nuclear weapons, and no Romans colonizing Mars 500 years after they worked out a steam engine.


By this rule we can answer some of the following, and discount some of the others:

What if Tang Dynasty China never happened and the use of paper never spread beyond the Chinese bureaucracy?
What if Genghis Khan died of a cold as a child?
What if Napoleon conquered Europe.
What if Egypt went the way of China and never lost dominance of their region?
What if Romans never invaded the British isles.
What if Zheng He's fleets were never scuppered and the Wall of China never rebuilt?
What if Buddhism never spread to China?
What if Christianity never spread to the west?
What if Caesar wasn't stabbed to death?
What if the Macedonians weren't such a pussies and just did what Alex told them and made it all the way to China?
What if Alex never went to the east and stayed in his already very large territory and actually did something with it?
What if Russians smiled more often?
What if Hollywood wasn't such a racist industry and didn't portray Xerxes as a 9 feet tall black African who wore golden undies?

i'll tackle the last two. (1) The world would end. (2.) For that you would have to go back to the original events and deal with a couple thousand years of stupid propaganda pretending six million Persians invaded and three hundred very muscled, very oiled men in very tight codpieces Saved The World From Orcs And Other Eastern Monsters. [When in truth it was not six million, it was not 300, and plenty of Greeks got along better under Persian rule than they did at the hand of their fellow Greeks.]

 

[olvirki]

This documentary talks a bit about it:Civilization: Is the west History?
its a great film, you all should have a look at it

I have seen the first ebisode, and my problem with it is that it is horribly biased. The question that he wanted to answer was intriguing, but I thought he was too biased.

 

[Beelz]

Ah ok. So apart from the time of Zheng He's fleet, China had less interest in the out side world than Japan ?

As far as I'm concerned the only potentially colonizing powers in the Far East have been China and Japan. China had a habit of looking inwards and ignoring the outside world. There's a reason they built the Great Wall. While it's true that the Japanese closed themselves off under the Tokugawa, but before that they had taken a keen interest in meddling with others. Hideyoshi's attempted invasion of Korea comes to mind.

 

[Gordy]

Removing a caveman no one has ever heard of will change more too. Would you argue that some cave man from the year 10,000 BC was more influential than Jesus?

I would. I think the most significant people in (pre)-history are unknown to us.

 

[Gordy]

Precisely. So in order to gauge how influential one person is, I think only counting what they personally did in their lifetimes is the most useful method. Anything that happened after that was because of their 'followers', or whatever you call them, not the original person. So when comparing Hitler and Jesus (two random examples), one should compare their impacts in 0-33 and 1889-1945, not 0-2013 and 1889-2013.

I don't. The fact that somebody had X number of followers after they died is a measure of how influential they were. Their followers were inspired by their message and passed on that inspiration. You don't need to have met Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to find them inspiring.

 

[Gordy]

It depends on how strictly you apply the butterfly effect. If you apply it strictly, then yes, as every single event between then and now has to be remade, so in the 10,000 years before Jesus, so many things will differ that the world will be much different. If applied less strictly, then probably still yes, given that whoever Jesus' parents might be eliminated, something else might happen, etc...

Influence is the wrong word to use really. It implies that we're talking about how much someone changed history through their actions, not what the biggest possible change could be. I.e, whilst Jesus may have been more influential than a small dinosaur 79,000,000 years ago, removing the Dinosaur will change much, much more.

I completely agree.

Each of us is the result of a unique meeting of an individual sperm and an egg. Each male produces millions of sperm and a woman has loads of eggs. The odds on any of us being conceived are staggeringly remote and that's presuming that your parents meet and marry in the first place. One tiny change in the lives of either of your parents and you wouldn't be conceived. And then think that it took thousands of generations of staggeringly remote conceptions to produce your parents.

If caveman X had decided not to make love to Mrs caveman X on just one occasion then very probably the entire history of the world would have been profoundly different. Not just that Hitler didn't exist but that Germany never existed and probably that Indo-Europeans never existed etc etc.

As you say I'm not sure it's the same as influential.

 

[Dale248]

i'll tackle the last two. (1) The world would end. (2.) For that you would have to go back to the original events and deal with a couple thousand years of stupid propaganda pretending six million Persians invaded and three hundred very muscled, very oiled men in very tight codpieces Saved The World From Orcs And Other Eastern Monsters. [When in truth it was not six million, it was not 300, and plenty of Greeks got along better under Persian rule than they did at the hand of their fellow Greeks.]

History is written by the victor... so half the things were arguing about could be completely wrong. but you hit the nail on the head with that one

I have seen the first episode, and my problem with it is that it is horribly biased. The question that he wanted to answer was intriguing, but I thought he was too biased.

yea he sorta was at the start, but watch the other 5 episodes and you might have a different opinion, event if you don't, its still a great documentary

 

[RedRalphWiggum]

I would. I think the most significant people in (pre)-history are unknown to us.

Right, well in that case you and I are like oil and water; never the twain shall meet. On this subject, in any case.

By your standards, the overwhelming factor in gauging this is where the person lived on the linear scale of time. I don't find this a useful method to measure influence.

 

[DoomBunny]

Right, well in that case you and I are like oil and water; never the twain shall meet. On this subject, in any case.

By your standards, the overwhelming factor in gauging this is where the person lived on the linear scale of time. I don't find this a useful method to measure influence.

But it's not influence we're judging, it's change. Namely, what will cause the most of it.

 

[RedRalphWiggum]

But it's not influence we're judging, it's change. Namely, what will cause the most of it.

...the major factor in which is when the person was born. Any nobody who lived 10,000 years ago will have caused exponentially more change then Jesus, Julius Caesar and Joseph Stalin put together. It's an absoultely pointless metric to use.

Dragutin Dimitrijević caused more changes than Hitler. yiou'd be an idiot to consider him more influential. If these are the metric you use, the thread should be called "who was born earliest?"

 

[DoomBunny]

...the major factor in which is when the person was born. Any nobody who lived 10,000 years ago will have caused exponentially more change then Jesus, Julius Caesar and Joseph Stalin put together. It's an absoultely pointless metric to use.

Well no, it's not. The question is asking what would cause the biggest change. Hence, the question should be answered with that which will cause the most change.

If you want to ask which historical figure/event had the most influence, then that's a different question.

 

[RedRalphWiggum]

Well no, it's not. The question is asking what would cause the biggest change.

OK, well then I can tell you all how to answer the thread conclusively - find out who the first living person recorded is and it's them.

 

[DoomBunny]

OK, well then I can tell you all how to answer the thread conclusively - find out who the first living person recorded is and it's them.

Two flaws in this logic:

The question is regarding changes post 1,000 AD.

Time is not the only factor. Whilst an event that is changed may change the outcome of an event that happened a second later, that event will still follow the most likely route. (i.e, if I go back to the Kennedy assassination and kill a butterfly 2 minutes before Oswald fires, then he may still fire. The decision will have to be remade, but it will still likely go the way it did.) You're probably right about finding the first living person, but the logic behind it isn't as singular as you seem to think.

 

[Dale248]

this thread is very entertaining

In order to prevent "if the dinos had not died" I'm going to limit this to the past 1000 or so years of history.

sorta failed at that

 

[Beagá]

Yeah epic thread derailing

 

[The Super Pope]

This documentary talks a bit about it:Civilization: Is the west History?
its a great film, you all should have a look at it

According to Ferguson, the rise of Europe can be explained with the Protestant Work Ethic, Capitalism and Democracy. How any of those account for the rise of France or Spain is beyond me.

I'll go with 1204 and the Fourth Crusade, without which the Byzantines may have survived and evolved into a Greek nation-state. More significantly, it would prevent the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, and undermine the need for exploration of the Americas.

 

[Herbert West]

Btw, if you want to change christianity, the person to remove is not Jesus, seeing as he was only one of the dime a dozen propeths, but Paul, who turned it from an exculsionist sect only for jews to an inclusionist sect for gentiles as well.

 

[Dale248]

According to Ferguson, the rise of Europe can be explained with the Protestant Work Ethic, Capitalism and Democracy. How any of those account for the rise of France or Spain is beyond me.

I'll go with 1204 and the Fourth Crusade, without which the Byzantines may have survived and evolved into a Greek nation-state. More significantly, it would prevent the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, and undermine the need for exploration of the Americas.

send me a documentary or resource about the fourth crusade. i haven't really looked in to that

i like to know both sides of an argument before i get involved

 

[Avernite]

Btw, if you want to change christianity, the person to remove is not Jesus, seeing as he was only one of the dime a dozen propeths, but Paul, who turned it from an exculsionist sect only for jews to an inclusionist sect for gentiles as well.

And even that might be argued, because various Mithras cults, as well as cults based on the various Graeco-Roman gods existed. I wouldn't quite know who had the most significant effect on Christianity being the group that gets biggest (by Constantine's time, for example, I think they had effectively 'won' already), but that to me seems as important as the shift from Jew-only to Gentiles-too. Unless it's its message, in which case any cult that wanted to be big would eventually adopt a Christian-like system and thereby win.

 

[olvirki]

Someone else said something similar, but I think that you should compare how influential changes are by looking at the result of the change after a specific amount of time. So say you are comparing changes to two historical events, and one is 500 years old and the other 2000 years old. You could look at the what had changed today if you change the 500 year old event, but then you should only try to figure out what has changes 500 years after the 2000 year old historical event.

As far as I'm concerned the only potentially colonizing powers in the Far East have been China and Japan. China had a habit of looking inwards and ignoring the outside world. There's a reason they built the Great Wall. While it's true that the Japanese closed themselves off under the Tokugawa, but before that they had taken a keen interest in meddling with others. Hideyoshi's attempted invasion of Korea comes to mind.

Weren't the Chinese more of a sea nation though (until Japan modernized in the 19th century) ? But if you change something as early as the birth of Mohamed that might change.

How advanced was Korea ? I am pretty sure it's population as much smaller than the population of Japan, and of course it was much smaller than China. Was Korea a potential colonizer ?

yea he sorta was at the start, but watch the other 5 episodes and you might have a different opinion, event if you don't, its still a great documentary

Yeah, I have not seen it all, so maybe it gets better. Regardless, is he aware of the horrible puns he makes ?

According to Ferguson, the rise of Europe can be explained with the Protestant Work Ethic, Capitalism and Democracy. How any of those account for the rise of France or Spain is beyond me.

Good point.

I'll go with 1204 and the Fourth Crusade, without which the Byzantines may have survived and evolved into a Greek nation-state. More significantly, it would prevent the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, and undermine the need for exploration of the Americas.

An interesting change.