Alternative histories

[drdoug]

sushidog asked (in a friends-locked post):you have a time machine, in which you can make three (and only three) trips. You may use one trip to change something in your own past, one trip to witness a past event, and one trip to change the world. No cheating, any attempts to game the system will dump you in a primaeval swamp with no way back to the future.

Comments

[bethanthepurple]

Fascinating reading!

I'd want to stop Kermit Roosevelt Jr succeeding in the coup against Iran's Mosaddeq.

[ckd]

Yeah. I can argue that that would stop a lot of badness with one change.

No Shah: no Islamic revolution. That eliminates the 1979 hostage crisis, and probably also the Iran-Iraq War.

Even if the war happens anyway, the US doesn't have the same incentive to be anti-Iran without the hostage crisis, so they don't support Iraq.

Without the history of US support, Saddam Hussein doesn't think he can get away with invading Kuwait.

Without that, there's no reason for US troops to be in Saudi Arabia.

No troops means no easy recruiting pitch for al-Qaeda to get 15 Saudis to go to the US and hijack airplanes.

No 9/11 means the Cheney administration can't whip up war fever for an invasion of Iraq (and without Desert Storm, much less incentive to try).

[vinaigrettegirl]

I'm a tadge spooked in a good way, despite my ability to rationalise this, but your ideas are remarkably much like mine, with the same referents, with a few exceptions.

However, I'd simplify down to 'universal access to clean water and hygiene' and 'no patriarchy, with genuine equality for women'. Those two things would make huge inroads into war, its causes and consequences, and into the negativity brought about by religion (even Buddhism places women into second-class status). Worldwide, women spend up to 90% of their incomes on other people; men spend as much as 40% on their own leisure activities. The leisure allowance men give themselves by comparison with women is a universal factor in household income and expenditure. I'm trying to imagine a world where men valued their own children, and other people's children, and put their money into that; and then I'm imagining controlled communicable diseases, adequately-funded schools, a more collaborative set of business models. It'd be a rather exciting and healthy world to live in.

[artremis]

Were a your Grandparents LMS missionaries? Quite a lot of my Dad's family were. And one of his post-official-retirement jobs was digitizing the LMS archive (held at SOAS) which provided some fancinating little glimpse into bits of 18th, 19th and 20th century history ...

[artremis]

I think I would influence the Emperor Constantine so that the version of Christaimity he adopted and foisted on the Roman Empire was a lot more radical and woman-positive. (And it's a bit hippy-tatstic but I'd like to think a more female friendly church would prioritise midwifery as something nuns and priestess should do and study and that would hopefully push some of the health improvements you've fantasised about too)

[ckd]

(Here via andrewducker)

On the Aristotle scenario, have you read the classic story "Aristotle and the Gun" by L. Sprague de Camp?