Suppose you could find out the exact outcome (up to the point of reading the alternate history equivalent of Wikipedia, history books etc.) of changing the outcome of a single historical event. What would that event be?
Note that major developments like “the Roman empire would never have fallen” or “the Chinese wouldn’t have turned inwards” involve multiple events, not just one.
So many. I can’t limit it to one, but my top four would be “What if Mohammed had never been born?”, “What if Julian the Apostate had succeeded in stamping out Christianity?” and “What if Thera had never blown and the Minoans had survived?” and “What if Alexander the Great had lived to a ripe old age?”
The civilizations of the Near East were fascinating, and although the early Islamic Empire was interesting in its own right it did a lot to homogenize some really cool places. It also dealt a fatal wound to Byzantium as well. If Mohammed had never existed, I would look forward to reading about the Zoroastrian Persians, the Byzantines, and the Romanized Syrians and Egyptians surviving much longer than they did.
The Minoans were the most advanced civilization of their time, and had plumbing, three story buildings, urban planning and possibly even primitive optics in 2000 BC (I wrote a bit about them here). Although they’ve no doubt been romanticized, in the romanticized version at least they had a pretty equitable society, gave women high status, and revered art and nature. Then they were all destroyed by a giant volcano. I remember reading one historian’s speculation that if they’d lived, a man would’ve landed on the moon by 1 AD.
I don’t have such antipathy to Christianity that I’d want to prevent it from ever existing, but it sure did give us 2000 odd years of boring religion. Julian the Apostate was a Roman emperor who ruled a few reigns after Constantine and tried to turn back the clock, de-establish Christianity, and revive all the old pagan cults. He was also a philosopher, an intellectual, and by most accounts a pretty honest and decent guy. He died after reigning barely over a year, from a spear wound incurred in battle. If he’d lived, for all we know the US could be One Nation Under Zeus (or Wodin, or whoever) right now.
As for Alexander the Great, he was just plain nifty. I think I heard he was planning a campaign against Carthage before he died. If he’d lived to 80, he could’ve conquered all Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia, and have unified the whole western world under a dynasty of philosopher-kings dedicated to spreading Greek culture and ideas. Given a few more years, he might also have solved that whole “successor” issue.
Given that Alexander was one of the most successful conquerors in all of history, he almost certainly benefited from being extremely lucky. If he had lived longer, therefore, he would have probably experienced much regression to the mean with respect to his military success.
Of course, once you are already the most successful conqueror alive you tend to need less luck. You can get by on the basic competence that comes from experience and the resources you now have at your disposal. (So long as you don’t, for example, try to take Russia. Although even then Alexander’s style would probably have worked better than Napoleon’s.)
The civilizations of the Near East were fascinating, and although the early Islamic Empire was interesting in its own right it did a lot to homogenize some really cool places.
As did the Christian culture before them. And the original Roman Empire before that. And Alexander’s Hellenistic culture spread by the fragments of his mini-empire. And the Persian empires that came and went in the region...
Along the same idea, but much more likely to yield radical differences to the future of human society, I’d like to know what would have happened if some ancient bottleneck epidemic had not happened or had happened differently (killed more or fewer people, or just different individuals). Much or all of the human gene pool after that altered event would be different.
I’d be curious to know what would have happened if Christopher Columbus’s fleet had been lost at sea during his first voyage across the Atlantic. Most scholars were already highly skeptical of his plans, as they were based on a miscalculation, and him not returning would have further discouraged any explorers from setting off in that direction. How much longer would it have taken before Europeans found out about the Americas, and how would history have developed in the meanwhile?
I would like to know what would have happened if, sometime during the Dark Ages let’s say, benevolent and extremely advanced aliens had landed with the intention to fix everything. I would diligently copy and disseminate the entire Wikipedia-equivalent for the generously-divulged scientific and sociological knowledge therein, plus cultural notes on the aliens such that I could write a really keenly plausible sci-fi series.
Not just science fiction and aliens either. Nearly all popular and successful fiction is based around what are effectively modern characters in whatever setting. I remember a paper I read back around the mid-eighties pointing out that Louis L’Amour’s characters were basically just modern Americans with the appropriate historical technology and locations.
As I wrote, I read it in something in the 1980s. Probably, but I ’m not sure, in Olander and Greenberg’s “Robert A Heinlein” or in Franklin’s “Robert A Heinlein: America as Science Fiction”.
Of course you can’t fully describe the scenario, or you would already have your answer, but even so, this question seems tantalizingly underspecified. Fix everything, by what standard? Human goals aren’t going to sync up exactly with alien goals (or why even call them aliens?), so what form does the aliens’ benevolence take? Do they try to help the humans in the way that humans would want to be helped, insofar as that problem has a unique answer? Do they give humanity half the stars, just to be nice? Insofar as there isn’t a unique answer to how-humans-would-want-to-be-helped, how can the aliens avoid engaging in what amounts to cultural imperialism—unilaterially choosing what human civilization develops into? So what kind of imperialism do they choose?
How advanced are these aliens? Maybe I’m working off horribly flawed assumptions, but in truth it seems kind of odd for them to have interstellar travel without superintelligence and uploading. (You say you want to write keenly plausible science fiction, so you are going have to do this kind of analysis.) The alien civilization has to be rich and advanced enough to send out a benevolent rescue ship, and yet not develop superintelligence and send out a colonization wave at near-c to eat the stars and prevent astronomical waste. Maybe the rescue ship itself was sent out at near-c and the colonization wave won’t catch up for a few decades or centuries? Maybe the rescue ship was sent out, and then the home civilization collapsed or died out?---and the rescue ship can’t return or rebuild on its own (not enough fuel or something), so they need some of the Sol system’s resources?
Or maybe there’s something about the aliens’ culture and psychology such that they are capable of developing interstellar travel but not capable of developing superintelligence? I don’t think it should be too surprising if the aliens should be congenitally confused, unable to discover certain concepts. (Compare how the hard problem of consciousness just seems impossible; maybe humans happen to be flawed in such a way such that we can never understand qualia.) So the aliens send their rescue ship, share their science and culture (insofar as alien culture can be shared), and eighty years later, the humans build an FAI. Then what?
OK, I sense cross-purposes here. You’re asking “what would be the most interesting and intelligible form of positive alien contact (in human terms)”, and Zack is asking “what would be the most probable form of positive alien contact”?
(By “positive alien contact”, I mean contact with aliens who have some goal that causes them to care about human values and preferences (think of the Superhappies), as opposed to a Paperclipper that only cares about us as potential resources for or obstacles to making paperclips.)
Keep in mind that what we think of as good sci-fi is generally an example of positing human problems (or allegories for them) in inventive settings, not of describing what might most likely happen in such a setting...
I’m worried that some of my concepts here are a little be shaky and confused in a way that I can’t articulate, but my provisional answer is: because their planet would have to be virtually a duplicate of Earth to get that kind of match. Suppose that my deepest heart’s desire, my lifework, is for me to write a grand romance novel about an actuary who lives in New York and her unusually tall boyfriend. That’s a necessary condition for my ideal universe: it has to contain me writing this beautiful, beautiful novel.
It doesn’t seem all that implausible that powerful aliens would have a goal of “be nice to all sentient creatures,” in which case they might very well help me with my goal in innumerable ways, perhaps by giving me a better word processor, or providing life extension so I can grow up to have a broader experience base with which to write. But I wouldn’t say that this is the same thing as the alien sharing my goals, because if humans had never evolved, it almost certainly wouldn’t have even occurred to the alien to create, from scratch, a human being who writes a grand romance novel about an actuary who lives in New York and her unusually tall boyfriend. A plausible alien is simply not going to spontaneously invent those concepts and put special value on them. Even if they have rough analogues to courtship story or even person who is rewarded for doing economic risk-management calculations, I guarantee you they’re not going to invent New York.
Even if the alien and I end up cooperating in real life, when I picture my ideal universe, and when they picture their ideal universe, they’re going to be different visions. The closest thing I can think of would be for the aliens to have evolved a sort of domain-general niceness, and to have a top-level goal for the universe to be filled with all sorts of diverse life with their own analogues of pleasure or goal-achievement or whatever, which me and my beautiful, beautiful novel would qualify as a special case of. Actually, I might agree with that as a good summary description of my top-level goal. The problem is, there are a lot of details that that summary description doesn’t pin down, which we would expect to differ. Even if the alien and I agree that the universe should blossom with diverse life, we would almost certainly have different rankings of which kinds of possible diverse life get included. If our future lightcone only has room for 10^200 observer-moments, and there are 10^4000 possible observer-moments, then some possible observer-moments won’t get to exist. I would want to ensure that me and my beautiful, beautiful novel get included, whereas the alien would have no advance reason to privilege me and my beautiful, beautiful novel over the quintillions of other possible beings with desires that they think of as their analogue of beautiful, beautiful.
This brings us to the apparent inevitability of something like cultural imperialism. Humans aren’t really optimizers—there doesn’t seem to be one unique human vision for what the universe should look like; there’s going to be room for multiple more-or-less reasonable construals of our volition. That being the case, why shouldn’t even benevolent aliens pick the construal that they like best?
Domain-general niceness works. It’s possible to be nice to and helpful to lots of different kinds of people with lots of different kinds of goals. Think Superhappies except with respect for autonomy.
I would try to study the effects of individual humans, Great-Man vs Historical Inevitability style, by knocking out statesmen of a particular period. Hitler is a cliche, whom I’d nonetheless start with; but I’d follow up by seeing what happens if you kill Chamberlain, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin… and work my way down to the likes of Turing and Doenitz. Do you still get France overrun in six weeks? A resurgent German nationalism? A defiant to-the-last-ditch mood in Britain? And so on.
Then I’d start on similar questions for the unification of Germany: Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, Franz Josef, Marx, Napoleon III, and so forth. Then perhaps the Great War or the Cold War, or perhaps I’d be bored with recent history and go for something medieval instead—Harald wins at Stamford Bridge, perhaps. Or to maintain the remove-one-person style of the experiment, there’s the three claimants to the British throne, one could kill Edgar the Confessor earlier, the Pope has a hand in it, there’s the various dukes and other feudal lords in England… lots of fun to be had with this scenario!
Don’t limit yourself to just killing people. It’s not a good way to learn how history works, just like studying biology by looking at organisms with defective genes doesn’t tell us everything we’d like to know about cell biology.
Nu, but I specified the particular part of “how history works” that I want to study, namely, are individuals important to large-scale events? For that purpose I think killing people would work admirably well. For other studies, certainly, I would use a different technique.
For that purpose I think killing people would work admirably well.
If you’re ok with a yes or no answer, then it’s enough. If you also want to know how individuals may be important to events, killing may not be enough, I think.
For starters, the Council of Nicea would flounder helplessly as every sect with access to a printing press floods the market with their particular version of christianity.
I’ve been curious to know what the “U.S.” would be like today if the American Revolution had failed.
Also, though it’s a bit cliche to respond to this question with something like “Hitler is never born”, it is interesting to think about just what is necessary to propel a nation into war / dictatorship / evil like that (e.g. just when can you kill / eliminate a single man and succeed in preventing it?) That’s something I’m fairly curious about (and the scope of my curiosity isn’t necessarily confined to Hitler—could be Bush II, Lincoln, Mao, an Islamic imam whose name I’ve forgotten, etc.).
I’d like to know what would have happened if the Library of Alexandria hadn’t been destroyed. If even the works of Archimedes alone—including the key insight underlying Integral Calculus—had survived longer and been more widely disseminated, what difference would that have made to the future progress of mathematics and technology?
I wonder if much in 20th century history would have been different if the USSR had been first to land someone on the Moon.
At the time, both sides played it like was something very important, if only for psychological reasons. But did that symbolic victory really mean that much? Did it actually alter the course of history much?
A recent Facebook status of mine: Too bad Benjamin Franklin wasn’t alive in 1835; he could have invented the Internet. The relay had been invented around then; that’s theoretically all that’s needed for computation and error correction, though it would go very slowly.
And if not then, by the time they had extensive telegraph or telephone networks, basic computation, and typewriters, about 1890 (sic). Why didn’t it? Numerous barriers, and their overcoming since then counts as political and scientific advances.
Take Cannae, for example. Can you really measure this as one outcome? It could be broken down into all kinds of things:
Varro’s (or Paullus’ if you happen to believe that Varro was indeed scapegoated for the disaster and that Paullus was really in command that day) decision to mass the legions in a phalanx, instead of their usual wide maniples.
Whether the Celts, Celtiberians and Iberians would have been able to hold the center against the legionaires without breaking.
Whether Hasdrubal would have managed to stop the Roman and Italian Cavalry
I cannot recall who was in command of he Numidians on the other flank, but if they had not been turned around when they went to pursue The Italian Allied Cavalry on their flank, that side of the battlefield would not have been enveloped by the Punic/African Heavy Infantry that Hannibal had held back
And, one could continue, probably down to the level of “Did Legionaire Plebius manage to hurl his pila soon enough to impale the charging Celtberian Villoni in time to keep the aforementioned Celtiberian from eventually killing Plebius’ centurian, who would have then gone on to kill Hannibal, just before he had time to issue the final order of the day?”
I don’t think you get a single outcome even from the best specified event—you’d get a big sheaf of outcomes.
If you could see all the multiple futures branching off from the present and have some way of sorting through them, you could presumably make better choices than you do now, but it would still be very hard to optimize much of anything.
Since we’re talking about a continuous probability measure, I’m not sure if that’s the right way to think about it. Perhaps it’s best to think of a randomly chosen point from the probability measure that evolves from a concentrated mass around a particular starting configuration— that is, a typical history given a particular branching point.
One could always argue that since there is only a finite (even if unimaginably huge) amount of possible branching points, we’re actually talking about a discrete probability distribution.
One could always argue that since there is only a finite (even if unimaginably huge) amount of possible branching points, we’re actually talking about a discrete probability distribution.
How do you mean?
I’m talking about the fundamental physics of the universe. From a mathematical perspective, it’s far more elegant (ergo, more likely) to deal with a partial differential equation defined on a continuous configuration space. Attempts to discretize the space in the name of infinite-set atheism seem ad-hoc to me.
Oh, right—I was under the impression that MWI would have involved discrete transitions at some point (I haven’t had the energy to read all of the MWI sequence). If that’s incorrect, then ignore my previous comment.
If Einstein was wrong, and Newton right. More specifically, if experiments held at the time revealed the speed of light were relative and the earth moved in either.
Suppose you could find out the exact outcome (up to the point of reading the alternate history equivalent of Wikipedia, history books etc.) of changing the outcome of a single historical event. What would that event be?
Note that major developments like “the Roman empire would never have fallen” or “the Chinese wouldn’t have turned inwards” involve multiple events, not just one.
So many. I can’t limit it to one, but my top four would be “What if Mohammed had never been born?”, “What if Julian the Apostate had succeeded in stamping out Christianity?” and “What if Thera had never blown and the Minoans had survived?” and “What if Alexander the Great had lived to a ripe old age?”
The civilizations of the Near East were fascinating, and although the early Islamic Empire was interesting in its own right it did a lot to homogenize some really cool places. It also dealt a fatal wound to Byzantium as well. If Mohammed had never existed, I would look forward to reading about the Zoroastrian Persians, the Byzantines, and the Romanized Syrians and Egyptians surviving much longer than they did.
The Minoans were the most advanced civilization of their time, and had plumbing, three story buildings, urban planning and possibly even primitive optics in 2000 BC (I wrote a bit about them here). Although they’ve no doubt been romanticized, in the romanticized version at least they had a pretty equitable society, gave women high status, and revered art and nature. Then they were all destroyed by a giant volcano. I remember reading one historian’s speculation that if they’d lived, a man would’ve landed on the moon by 1 AD.
I don’t have such antipathy to Christianity that I’d want to prevent it from ever existing, but it sure did give us 2000 odd years of boring religion. Julian the Apostate was a Roman emperor who ruled a few reigns after Constantine and tried to turn back the clock, de-establish Christianity, and revive all the old pagan cults. He was also a philosopher, an intellectual, and by most accounts a pretty honest and decent guy. He died after reigning barely over a year, from a spear wound incurred in battle. If he’d lived, for all we know the US could be One Nation Under Zeus (or Wodin, or whoever) right now.
As for Alexander the Great, he was just plain nifty. I think I heard he was planning a campaign against Carthage before he died. If he’d lived to 80, he could’ve conquered all Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia, and have unified the whole western world under a dynasty of philosopher-kings dedicated to spreading Greek culture and ideas. Given a few more years, he might also have solved that whole “successor” issue.
Given that Alexander was one of the most successful conquerors in all of history, he almost certainly benefited from being extremely lucky. If he had lived longer, therefore, he would have probably experienced much regression to the mean with respect to his military success.
Of course, once you are already the most successful conqueror alive you tend to need less luck. You can get by on the basic competence that comes from experience and the resources you now have at your disposal. (So long as you don’t, for example, try to take Russia. Although even then Alexander’s style would probably have worked better than Napoleon’s.)
As did the Christian culture before them. And the original Roman Empire before that. And Alexander’s Hellenistic culture spread by the fragments of his mini-empire. And the Persian empires that came and went in the region...
I’d really, really like to see what the world would be like today if a single butterfly’s wings had flapped slightly faster back in 5000 B.C.
Along the same idea, but much more likely to yield radical differences to the future of human society, I’d like to know what would have happened if some ancient bottleneck epidemic had not happened or had happened differently (killed more or fewer people, or just different individuals). Much or all of the human gene pool after that altered event would be different.
I’d like to see a world in which all ancestor-types of humans through to the last common ancestor with chimps still lived in many places.
Book recommendation
I’d be pretty interested in seeing the results of this set of Malaria-resistance mutations having been more widespread.
Probably not badly enough to pony up for the computational power necessary to find the answer though, right?
ETA: Nevermind, didn’t see the parent prompt. Still an important consideration though, so I’m leaving it in...
I’d be curious to know what would have happened if Christopher Columbus’s fleet had been lost at sea during his first voyage across the Atlantic. Most scholars were already highly skeptical of his plans, as they were based on a miscalculation, and him not returning would have further discouraged any explorers from setting off in that direction. How much longer would it have taken before Europeans found out about the Americas, and how would history have developed in the meanwhile?
Have you read Orson Scott Card’s “Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus”? It suggest an answer to this question.
Not a very realistic one, though.
I would like to know what would have happened if, sometime during the Dark Ages let’s say, benevolent and extremely advanced aliens had landed with the intention to fix everything. I would diligently copy and disseminate the entire Wikipedia-equivalent for the generously-divulged scientific and sociological knowledge therein, plus cultural notes on the aliens such that I could write a really keenly plausible sci-fi series.
A sci-fi series based on real extra-terrestrials would quite possibly be so alien to us that no one would want to read it.
Not just science fiction and aliens either. Nearly all popular and successful fiction is based around what are effectively modern characters in whatever setting. I remember a paper I read back around the mid-eighties pointing out that Louis L’Amour’s characters were basically just modern Americans with the appropriate historical technology and locations.
I’ve found that Umberto Eco’s novels do the best job I’ve seen at avoiding this.
I’d love to see an essay-length expansion on this theme.
As I wrote, I read it in something in the 1980s. Probably, but I ’m not sure, in Olander and Greenberg’s “Robert A Heinlein” or in Franklin’s “Robert A Heinlein: America as Science Fiction”.
I might have to mess with them a bit to get an audience, yes.
Of course you can’t fully describe the scenario, or you would already have your answer, but even so, this question seems tantalizingly underspecified. Fix everything, by what standard? Human goals aren’t going to sync up exactly with alien goals (or why even call them aliens?), so what form does the aliens’ benevolence take? Do they try to help the humans in the way that humans would want to be helped, insofar as that problem has a unique answer? Do they give humanity half the stars, just to be nice? Insofar as there isn’t a unique answer to how-humans-would-want-to-be-helped, how can the aliens avoid engaging in what amounts to cultural imperialism—unilaterially choosing what human civilization develops into? So what kind of imperialism do they choose?
How advanced are these aliens? Maybe I’m working off horribly flawed assumptions, but in truth it seems kind of odd for them to have interstellar travel without superintelligence and uploading. (You say you want to write keenly plausible science fiction, so you are going have to do this kind of analysis.) The alien civilization has to be rich and advanced enough to send out a benevolent rescue ship, and yet not develop superintelligence and send out a colonization wave at near-c to eat the stars and prevent astronomical waste. Maybe the rescue ship itself was sent out at near-c and the colonization wave won’t catch up for a few decades or centuries? Maybe the rescue ship was sent out, and then the home civilization collapsed or died out?---and the rescue ship can’t return or rebuild on its own (not enough fuel or something), so they need some of the Sol system’s resources?
Or maybe there’s something about the aliens’ culture and psychology such that they are capable of developing interstellar travel but not capable of developing superintelligence? I don’t think it should be too surprising if the aliens should be congenitally confused, unable to discover certain concepts. (Compare how the hard problem of consciousness just seems impossible; maybe humans happen to be flawed in such a way such that we can never understand qualia.) So the aliens send their rescue ship, share their science and culture (insofar as alien culture can be shared), and eighty years later, the humans build an FAI. Then what?
Why not, as long as I’m making things up?
Because they are from another planet.
I do not know enough science to address the rest of your complaints.
OK, I sense cross-purposes here. You’re asking “what would be the most interesting and intelligible form of positive alien contact (in human terms)”, and Zack is asking “what would be the most probable form of positive alien contact”?
(By “positive alien contact”, I mean contact with aliens who have some goal that causes them to care about human values and preferences (think of the Superhappies), as opposed to a Paperclipper that only cares about us as potential resources for or obstacles to making paperclips.)
Keep in mind that what we think of as good sci-fi is generally an example of positing human problems (or allegories for them) in inventive settings, not of describing what might most likely happen in such a setting...
I’m worried that some of my concepts here are a little be shaky and confused in a way that I can’t articulate, but my provisional answer is: because their planet would have to be virtually a duplicate of Earth to get that kind of match. Suppose that my deepest heart’s desire, my lifework, is for me to write a grand romance novel about an actuary who lives in New York and her unusually tall boyfriend. That’s a necessary condition for my ideal universe: it has to contain me writing this beautiful, beautiful novel.
It doesn’t seem all that implausible that powerful aliens would have a goal of “be nice to all sentient creatures,” in which case they might very well help me with my goal in innumerable ways, perhaps by giving me a better word processor, or providing life extension so I can grow up to have a broader experience base with which to write. But I wouldn’t say that this is the same thing as the alien sharing my goals, because if humans had never evolved, it almost certainly wouldn’t have even occurred to the alien to create, from scratch, a human being who writes a grand romance novel about an actuary who lives in New York and her unusually tall boyfriend. A plausible alien is simply not going to spontaneously invent those concepts and put special value on them. Even if they have rough analogues to courtship story or even person who is rewarded for doing economic risk-management calculations, I guarantee you they’re not going to invent New York.
Even if the alien and I end up cooperating in real life, when I picture my ideal universe, and when they picture their ideal universe, they’re going to be different visions. The closest thing I can think of would be for the aliens to have evolved a sort of domain-general niceness, and to have a top-level goal for the universe to be filled with all sorts of diverse life with their own analogues of pleasure or goal-achievement or whatever, which me and my beautiful, beautiful novel would qualify as a special case of. Actually, I might agree with that as a good summary description of my top-level goal. The problem is, there are a lot of details that that summary description doesn’t pin down, which we would expect to differ. Even if the alien and I agree that the universe should blossom with diverse life, we would almost certainly have different rankings of which kinds of possible diverse life get included. If our future lightcone only has room for 10^200 observer-moments, and there are 10^4000 possible observer-moments, then some possible observer-moments won’t get to exist. I would want to ensure that me and my beautiful, beautiful novel get included, whereas the alien would have no advance reason to privilege me and my beautiful, beautiful novel over the quintillions of other possible beings with desires that they think of as their analogue of beautiful, beautiful.
This brings us to the apparent inevitability of something like cultural imperialism. Humans aren’t really optimizers—there doesn’t seem to be one unique human vision for what the universe should look like; there’s going to be room for multiple more-or-less reasonable construals of our volition. That being the case, why shouldn’t even benevolent aliens pick the construal that they like best?
Domain-general niceness works. It’s possible to be nice to and helpful to lots of different kinds of people with lots of different kinds of goals. Think Superhappies except with respect for autonomy.
I would try to study the effects of individual humans, Great-Man vs Historical Inevitability style, by knocking out statesmen of a particular period. Hitler is a cliche, whom I’d nonetheless start with; but I’d follow up by seeing what happens if you kill Chamberlain, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin… and work my way down to the likes of Turing and Doenitz. Do you still get France overrun in six weeks? A resurgent German nationalism? A defiant to-the-last-ditch mood in Britain? And so on.
Then I’d start on similar questions for the unification of Germany: Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, Franz Josef, Marx, Napoleon III, and so forth. Then perhaps the Great War or the Cold War, or perhaps I’d be bored with recent history and go for something medieval instead—Harald wins at Stamford Bridge, perhaps. Or to maintain the remove-one-person style of the experiment, there’s the three claimants to the British throne, one could kill Edgar the Confessor earlier, the Pope has a hand in it, there’s the various dukes and other feudal lords in England… lots of fun to be had with this scenario!
Don’t limit yourself to just killing people. It’s not a good way to learn how history works, just like studying biology by looking at organisms with defective genes doesn’t tell us everything we’d like to know about cell biology.
Nu, but I specified the particular part of “how history works” that I want to study, namely, are individuals important to large-scale events? For that purpose I think killing people would work admirably well. For other studies, certainly, I would use a different technique.
If you’re ok with a yes or no answer, then it’s enough. If you also want to know how individuals may be important to events, killing may not be enough, I think.
I’d like to know what would have happened if movable type had been invented in the 3rd century AD.
For starters, the Council of Nicea would flounder helplessly as every sect with access to a printing press floods the market with their particular version of christianity.
I’ve been curious to know what the “U.S.” would be like today if the American Revolution had failed.
Also, though it’s a bit cliche to respond to this question with something like “Hitler is never born”, it is interesting to think about just what is necessary to propel a nation into war / dictatorship / evil like that (e.g. just when can you kill / eliminate a single man and succeed in preventing it?) That’s something I’m fairly curious about (and the scope of my curiosity isn’t necessarily confined to Hitler—could be Bush II, Lincoln, Mao, an Islamic imam whose name I’ve forgotten, etc.).
Something like Canada I guess.
While we’re at it, what if the Continental Congress failed at replacing the Articles of Confederation?
Code Geass :)
Sadly, that is more like the result if the ARW fails and the laws of physics were weirdly different.
I’d like to know what would have happened if the Library of Alexandria hadn’t been destroyed. If even the works of Archimedes alone—including the key insight underlying Integral Calculus—had survived longer and been more widely disseminated, what difference would that have made to the future progress of mathematics and technology?
I wonder if much in 20th century history would have been different if the USSR had been first to land someone on the Moon.
At the time, both sides played it like was something very important, if only for psychological reasons. But did that symbolic victory really mean that much? Did it actually alter the course of history much?
China not imposing the Hai Jin edict. Greater chinese exploration would have meant an extremely different and interesting history.
May you live in interesting times!
A recent Facebook status of mine: Too bad Benjamin Franklin wasn’t alive in 1835; he could have invented the Internet. The relay had been invented around then; that’s theoretically all that’s needed for computation and error correction, though it would go very slowly.
Well, Charles Babbage was alive back then...
Huh. Then, uh… too bad Charles Babbage wasn’t Benjamin Franklin?
And if not then, by the time they had extensive telegraph or telephone networks, basic computation, and typewriters, about 1890 (sic). Why didn’t it? Numerous barriers, and their overcoming since then counts as political and scientific advances.
This one is hard.
Take Cannae, for example. Can you really measure this as one outcome? It could be broken down into all kinds of things:
Varro’s (or Paullus’ if you happen to believe that Varro was indeed scapegoated for the disaster and that Paullus was really in command that day) decision to mass the legions in a phalanx, instead of their usual wide maniples.
Whether the Celts, Celtiberians and Iberians would have been able to hold the center against the legionaires without breaking.
Whether Hasdrubal would have managed to stop the Roman and Italian Cavalry
I cannot recall who was in command of he Numidians on the other flank, but if they had not been turned around when they went to pursue The Italian Allied Cavalry on their flank, that side of the battlefield would not have been enveloped by the Punic/African Heavy Infantry that Hannibal had held back
And, one could continue, probably down to the level of “Did Legionaire Plebius manage to hurl his pila soon enough to impale the charging Celtberian Villoni in time to keep the aforementioned Celtiberian from eventually killing Plebius’ centurian, who would have then gone on to kill Hannibal, just before he had time to issue the final order of the day?”
So, how are you defining “A single event” here?
Loosely. Any of the ones you listed would be fine for me.
I don’t think you get a single outcome even from the best specified event—you’d get a big sheaf of outcomes.
If you could see all the multiple futures branching off from the present and have some way of sorting through them, you could presumably make better choices than you do now, but it would still be very hard to optimize much of anything.
Okay—“suppose you could find out the single most probable outcome...”
Since we’re talking about a continuous probability measure, I’m not sure if that’s the right way to think about it. Perhaps it’s best to think of a randomly chosen point from the probability measure that evolves from a concentrated mass around a particular starting configuration— that is, a typical history given a particular branching point.
One could always argue that since there is only a finite (even if unimaginably huge) amount of possible branching points, we’re actually talking about a discrete probability distribution.
Your approach works, too.
How do you mean?
I’m talking about the fundamental physics of the universe. From a mathematical perspective, it’s far more elegant (ergo, more likely) to deal with a partial differential equation defined on a continuous configuration space. Attempts to discretize the space in the name of infinite-set atheism seem ad-hoc to me.
Oh, right—I was under the impression that MWI would have involved discrete transitions at some point (I haven’t had the energy to read all of the MWI sequence). If that’s incorrect, then ignore my previous comment.
The easy and trite answer is: the event of EY discovering a correct FAI theory, which is so simple that it’s fully described in the Wikipedia article.
Related: what if I. J. Good had taken himself seriously and started a Singularity effort rather than just writing that one article?
If Einstein was wrong, and Newton right. More specifically, if experiments held at the time revealed the speed of light were relative and the earth moved in either.
Surely this isn’t changing a single historical event but the laws governing our universe.