Posts tagged alternate-history
My question is pretty simple, if the steam locomotive were invented during the middle to late medieval period, what would it look like? We are just going to ignore how it was invented. My guess i...
This is a skeleton of a titanosaur, not quite the longest of the dinosaurs, but most certainly the heaviest! As far as we have found, we'd found no species exceeding 75 tons. This post focuses ...
On 20 October 1861, while in Paris, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph Maria von Hapsburg, brother of the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, received a letter from Jose Maria Gutierrez de Estrada, a Mexican nobl...
Here's the explanation These are the structural questions about my "Super Dreadnought". How wide would the ship have to be to be stable on the water? Would the Caterpillar treads hold the weight...
The most recent common ancestor of the HIV-1 M group, responsible for the HIV pandemic, dates back to the Belgian Congo city of Léopoldville (modern Kinshasa), circa 1910. And the genetic history ...
If the central Milky Way contained a highly active, accreting quasar, with a steady luminosity of 100 trillion solar that is 27,000 lightyears away and became active 27,000 years ago (the emissions...
Many games have various side bonuses on their armors other than just defense. These bonuses can often be active things like having a ghost thrall to protect you when wearing a special armor or mor...
I am working on an alternate history where the USSR won the Moon Race (by upgrading the NK-15, starting development of the N1 earlier, and making cybernetics/computer science not a "bourgeois pseud...
Let us develop an industrial electric motor from first principles. Alessandro Volta developed a battery whose ingredients were copper, zinc, seawater, and imagination. These ingredients have been ...
A common topic in alternate history fiction works is the question what would have happened if a major war had been won by the other side. These usually focus on the events after the war, and the ch...
Assume I have someone who doesn't age, and has a lot of time to learn any skill or experiment with things, but who was born and raised (prior to becoming ageless) in a medieval farming village. He...
Around the American Civil War period, TNT and nitroglycerin were discovered. This made me wonder... what if a more effective recipe for TNT was developed, and efforts were made to manufacture it? ...
My society/area is set in a isolated wasteland where the primary income of people is ranching. However, I want my people to be able to at least be able to maintain technology at a 1916 level (the r...
As stated in the topic: I would like to have Project Olympus-style space stations served by Apollo-like spacecraft in a world where neither nuclear power (and weapons) nor transistors were develope...
The question of whether the Romans could have crossed the Atlantic in a storm has already been answered and the answer seems to be: yes but unlikely. Could the Romans have crossed the Atlantic in ...
Imagine that a group of Inuits from Greenland settled in Antarctica; let's say on the Antarctic peninsula, if there is no better place in Antarctica. Could they survive there with their traditiona...
In my setting, military innovation spurred by the American Civil War (1861-1865) prompts the design and construction of counterweight-driven skyhooks for the delivery of suborbital long-range munit...
I was imagining a scenario where an 21st century engineer accidentally finds himself transported through time to early Renaissance Europe. Realizing that no help or rescue is on the way, he decides...
Assuming it just spins at the same rate, the other way. Axial tilt is the same, year length is the same. Perhaps winds and ocean currents? What would the effect be on geography? Would deserts or r...
From 359 to 298 million years ago, the "Carboniferous Coal Swamps" dominated the continents. It was the Carboniferous coal itself that sparked one of the greatest watersheds in human history--th...
Because of an error in the interpretation of the Mayan calendar I just discovered, I know now that Earth will be destroyed on March 13, 2021 at 11 o'clock in the morning, time zone of Palenque. I ...
Suppose that Khufu, pharaoh of Egypt and builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, was introduced to the idea of an amusement park. More specifically, suppose that he was visited by a time traveler a...
What is the oldest a still extant cave on Earth could be? What conditions could encourage the longevity of a cave? It seems that the oldest known caves, the Jenolan Caves in Australia, formed i...
In our world's 2016, the German town of Munich is part of the country of Germany. Now in an alternate Earth I would like Munich to be part of the Great French Empire (in the alternate year of 2016...
Since the geological history of the world's largest nation is as big as the nation itself, and since I don't have a master familiarity with Russia's formation over hundreds of millions of years, I'...
The first man on the moon was there on July 20th, 1969. After December of 1972, there has not been a person on the moon since. But, what if the missions to the moon had kept on going? By what time ...
Word on the street is that carbon nanotubes may be the future of construction. Apparently, a skeleton of this material would be stronger yet lighter than a skeleton of steel, which could mean exte...
Here are some lists of North American and South American megafauna that went extinct during the Quaternary. In Eurasia, many species of large mammal were domesticated, most particularly the 'big 4...
In a world where man entered North and South America without causing a mass extinction, all of the paleofauna which became extinct ~10,000 BC in the Americas are still around. There are several fam...
Here's the scenario: 400 million years ago, a species of lobe-finned fish created tetrapod history as it gulped up air, not water. Fast-forward to 342 million years ago, and one species immediate...
In the spirit of Thanksgiving (US) let's tackle a fun one. I'm defining "intelligent" in this situation as "at least on par with hunter-gatherer humans, able to communicate" What natural, environm...
I am considering whether a pre-Industrial civilisation could carry on for millennia on an Earth-like planet without entering the Industrial Age. Of course, regularly destroying everything with pla...
Without a doubt, the most iconic mammals of Australia are the pouch-bearing marsupials. You can find less than 250 species in that one island-continent. Marsupials have been around for 65 milli...
So, let's say that through a series of strange timey wimey events, I accidentally jump-start several technological revolutions in the early 1800's. So, at any given time, technology is ~60 y...
Looking at the topographical map of the two main islands of Britain--England to the east and Ireland to the west--is looking at two and a half million years of ice sculpting, grinding and melting...
I have got a fictional universe, where a humanoid lifeform evolved on earth not from apes, but from bears. The humanoid bears are like humans; they walk on their legs only, wear clothing, have vari...
If the gravity on earth was different, how would our bodies change? For this question, assume that gravity was five time stronger (5G) from the beginning of the Earth. Would a human-like body stil...
I was originally going to claim my world has very low levels of sulfur, resulting in a lack of gunpowder and thus a lack of guns. But after realizing how cool things like fireworks and Hwacha are, ...
This is the map of our Permian from 300 to 252 million years ago: As you can see, (nearly) all of the continents had joined together to create one massive landmass called Pangaea. To the sharp ...
I always feel like "hypothetical history of science" questions are kind of impossible, but here's a go anyway: Imagine that, for the entirety of human history, EM radiation from anything beyond th...
I ask because I have a problem trying to find an appropriate launch window around that time or any point in the mid-1980s, and I need to reach Jupiter via Hohmann transfer so I can then use a serie...
In my alternate history, during the Islamic golden age (in this case, 9th century Arabia - present day Oman), my characters are building a series of glass towers. They are like lighthouses travers...
This is for a project where the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from early US atomic bomb tests is somehow much more magnified than the destructive blast- so much so that it destroys electrical devices...
Imagine a scenario where the moon is not tidally locked with one side facing the earth but where it is able to rotate about its own axis. This could be due to a larger distance from earth or a mild...
How can I explain, in a believable way of course, that country borders closely resemble drainage divides? They don't always match mountain ridges, which are natural borders "“Â as are the rivers th...
Tech level is early Rome, China, Ethiopia, etc. ~ first century BC. Unlike history, there's peace and cooperation among all the benign monarchies of the whole Earth. But it's hard to get daily co...
Aliens have come to Earth, and decided that the most intelligent life on the planet must live in the water, because it makes up most of the planet. They encounter dolphins and, upon learning to tra...
It is 1970. Planet Earth is uninhabitable - the Cold War got very hot. The Earth's entire population is floating through space in giant transport ships. They've found another habitable(ish) world....
Okay, there are two habitable worlds in the Solar System. One of them is Earth. Human history goes mainly the way it really went. Then, there is another planet with a sentient, equally advanced spe...
I have some ideas, but I'd like my fictional Roman (100BC) General Mikey (ha) to build a submarine(s). This should be able to navigate in lakes and calm shores of the Mediterranean, succeed in bri...
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