Awesome PODs that you wish got more attention

What are some ideas or points of divergence that you think are really awesome but get little-to-no attention, and wish that you saw more people doing something with?

[Posting this in the post-1900 forum because I figure that's what most of the responses will fit into; hopefully I'm not wrong]

Microbiology and the age of antibiotics could have come MUCH earlier.

The idea of religious freedom could have been hit upon a lot earlier just as the normal, regular, standard way of doing things. Maybe this needs one religion to be 20% of the population and the other 80%, rather than a more contentious situation closer to 50-50.*

*Or if a religion is fast growing, people can anticipate and in fact over-anticipate it becoming big. For example, I think at one point Mark Twain seriously worried about Christian Science becoming a state religion, and it wasn't even close.

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I'm sorry these are pre-1900. will try and put on my thinking cap and come up with some which are post

Perhaps one day I'll start a thread about this: What if a group of "concerned citizens" in Bethel, New York, went to court days before the Woodstock Festival was scheduled to start and persuaded a court to shut it down?

This actually happened in 1970. The Powder Ridge Festival, to be held at a ski resort in Connecticut, was enjoined by court order. Despite the injunction, about 30,000 people showed up. There was no music; and the drug dealers, who had anticipated a much larger crowd, had to unload their inventory at fire-sale prices.

What If Arthur Bremer assassinated President Richard Nixon in early 1972?

Pre-1900, but what if James Garfield had survived either the bullet or his doctors' malpractice? He was probably one of the singularly most intelligent Presidents ever elected, what with his ability to write Greek with one hand and Latin with another while also figuring out another way of proving Pythagoras's Theorem with trapeziums.

Statesman said:

What If Arthur Bremer assassinated President Richard Nixon in early 1972?

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But that would just lead to Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo which is boring.

What if William McKinley wasn't shot?

What if Frederick III, German Emperor, had lived longer?

A few of mine, from a list of scenario seeds I did for DWAITAS. This batch are for the period 1791-1831.

1. In 1793 an American named Eli Whitney developed a ‘cotton gin’, a mechanical device for separating fibres and seeds from cotton. This revolutionised the production of the fabric, thus entrenching the plantation slavery system in the Southern USA and causing the quadrupling of the slave population over the next fifty years. What if he had been prevented from publicising the device?

2. What if the "18th Brumaire" coup in 1799, that made Napoleon First Consul, had failed and the unpopular and ineffective Directory had continued governing France? Would the country survive as a republic, would a monarchy re-emerge (possibly with foreign assistance) or would the nation fragment?
3. Also in 1799 during the Battle of Seringapatam one Arthur Wellesley led a night attack on the village of Sultanpettah, being injured in the leg in the fighting. What if he had instead been seriously injured, killed or captured and killed?

4. Arrange for the plot of the rue Saint-Nicaise (an attempt to assassinate Napoleon just before xmas in 1800) to succeed. With Napoleon killed by the cart-bomb the French leadership lacks a central figure, what happens next? Does this inspire more such attacks?

5. The Battle of Eylau in 1807 has a number of possibilities; what if the messenger carrying Napoleon's orders to Bernadotte had not been captured? What if Napoleon himself had been captured (as nearly happened)?

6. In 1811 William Henry Harrison, the shortest serving president of the USA (and probably the most stupid) was involved in the battle against Native Americans at Tippecanoe, Indiana. What if he was killed there? Would Clay and Webster have found a suitable puppet for their plans? And what effect on US history would the absence of “His Accidency” John Tyler have?

7. The only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated was Spencer Perceval, who was shot by a lone madman at 5:15PM on the evening of the 11th of May 1812 in the lobby of the House of Commons. What if Perceval’s life was saved?

8. What happens if General Claude Francois Malet's conspiracy against Napoleon during his absence in Russia succeeds? How would the French react to King Louis XVIII?

9. The "Battle of the Nations" at Leipzig in 1813 was the largest battle in Europe until World War One. What if Napoleon was killed there? What if he won? One interesting possibility is the capture of Tsar Alexander I, King Frederick William III of Prussia and several Russian and Prussian generals by troops under Colonel Marbot (something which nearly happened historically, but the Allied officers were alerted by an accidental gunshot).

10. 1827 saw the death of another British Prime Minister, George Canning. A well regarded moderate Tory he’s often considered a “lost leader” (he served as PM for only 119 days) with great potential. What if he hadn't died? Would the Tory party have collapsed as it did historically?

Tom Colton said:

Pre-1900, but what if James Garfield had survived either the bullet or his doctors' malpractice? He was probably one of the singularly most intelligent Presidents ever elected, what with his ability to write Greek with one hand and Latin with another while also figuring out another way of proving Pythagoras's Theorem with trapeziums.

Click to expand...

A favourite of mine. The idiotic probings of his physicians with their unsterilised instruments doomed the poor bugger to a nasty death.
It might have been a very different Gilded Age if he'd survived.

Proper radical reconstruction, destroy the Planter class compensate and enfrachise former slaves

One of the most interesting for me is an earlier rearmament for Britain and France in the 30s - or France not being defeated in 1940 (same thing)

Could also be a TL where an alliance is formed between Britain France and Russia in the late 30s - Stalin wanted it but Britain didn't trust him to many differences between them.

Could also be one where Czechoslovakia stands up to Hitler in 1938/39 - it resists the occupation of the Sudetenland through standing up its armed forces along with support from Britain, France and Poland.

One that's actually after 1900.

At about 9PM on the night 15JUL1945 a young Harvard educated chemist named Donald Hornig climbed a rickety ladder in the pouring rain and spent several hours in a small metal shed atop a 30m tower in the New Mexico desert babysitting the first nuclear bomb. He'd brought Desert Island Decameron to read and had a phone for emergencies. An electrical storm was forecast and he was there to ensure the armed Gadget was safe.

Hornig had designed the 'X-unit', a roughly 200kg device of storage batteries, capacitors and circuitry that would transmit the electrical firing charges to the bridgewire detonators that would the initiate the implosion of the 6kg plutonium core. He also knew how susceptible the unit was to accidental initiation by static electricity. A week before the test an X-unit had fired in an electrical storm, triggered by a nearby lightning strike.
At midnight, with the storm receding, he was told to come down. The test was scheduled for 4AM. Hornig was the last person to see the bomb before it was detonated.

What if the bomb had detonated prematurely that night? Would the US government have considered the devices dangerously unstable and demanded more testing before they were employed against Japan? What effect would the delay have had on the course of the war?


Or for something a little more ASB-ish, what if a couple of kilos of anti-matter had been buried under the tower?

Dealing with more recent post-1900 history, what if Ukraine hadn't given up its nukes after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

-What if U.S. was better prepared for WWI and/or WWII? This doesn't get as much attention as I would like. If the U.S. was only one year ahead of the curve regarding mobilization in both wars, then those wars probably end sooner and with U.S. with stronger hand in post-war negotiations.

-What if Mao did not win complete victory in Chinese Civil War? I've mentioned this a thousand times on various message boards. If Mao loses, or is only partially successful, then the Democrats don't get blamed for "losing China." Then there is a much milder Red Scare, possibly not one at all, and then Kennedy and LBJ won't feel the need to overcompensate in Vietnam, thus sparing a lot of lives and heartache.

-Richard Sorge killed prior to June 1941, or even October 1941
-Lockheed begins development of the L-133 in 1939 with its own money, probably with a prototype by mid-1941

-Doble Steam Motors decides to invest in Nathan Price's jet engine, first *built* in 1934 with comparable performance to aircraft of the day but then allowed to languish (in which case the L-133 might be available in 1940 and second-generation jets around by the early part of the war)

-Soviet or German/Canadian inventors develop crude transistors in the late 1920s

-Goddard gets military or additional civilian funding in the early 1920s

-First atomic pile in Chicago goes critical in 1942

-Stalin dies of a stroke in 1937 or 1947

-Beria succeeds in taking control of the Soviet Union and settles accounts with the West, allowing German reunification in 1955

-Peron does not kill off the viability or credibility of Argentina

-Apollo 11 runs out of fuel on the lunar surface

-Apollo 1 succeeds but Apollo 11 fails

-DC vs Heller court case goes 5-4 *against* Heller

-Nuclear torpedo from Soviet submarine in 1962 is fired against US fleet (Thank you, Mr. Vasili Arkhipov)

-Computer errors from Cold War that might have caused World War III

-Accidental atomic destruction in North Carolina or New Mexico following accidents involving nuclear weapons

-JFK survives his term

-Cuba completes the Juragua nuclear power facility in Cienfuegos province (started in early 1980s), with Chernobyl-style VVER-440 reactors

-1991 Iraq War with ouster of Saddam

-Shah of Iran dies of Leukemia 2 years earlier

-Revolt of the Admirals succeeds in drawing money away from the Air Force for supercarrier construction

-French breakdown of leadership in February 1899 becomes more severe and prompts intervention by Bonapartists, Orleanists, and possibly foreign powers with additional conflict among pro-Dreyfuss and anti-Dreyfuss factions.

-Napoleon the Monarchist, Sailor, or Cardinal

-Erich Kordt kills Hitler in July of 1939 (variant on Oster conspiracy) or

-Johann Elser kills Hitler in October 1939 along with most of the Party leadership (Goebbels, Frank, Heydrich, Himmler, Hess, Frank, Ley, Rosenberg, and Streicher among others). Goering and Bormann are about all that's left by that point...

What if Byrd hangs the Electoral College in 1960?

What if Britain discovers North Sea Oil in 1960?

What if Mariner 4 had flown by Mars a few hours earlier (passing over Tharsis and what is now called the Mariner Valley)?

Datapoint
(the company that could have make computing history unrecognisable)

Molten salt reactor
(so much better than PWR... no TMI, no Chernobyl, no Fukushima)

Suborbital refueling
(because so few person think about it, yet it could make a SSTO feasible, right now (quick, I take my shield ) )

Ammonia instead of gasoline in cars
(because there's already an ammonia network, for agriculture. And no carbon emissions)



The Townes report, January 8, 1969
The little document that could: had Nixon took it seriously, we could have continued Apollo. It was the right document with the right conclusions at the right moment)

SO-4050 Vautour instead of Mirage IV - just like Buccaneer instead of TSR-2 - what's the point of going supersonic when flying tree-top, where resistance of air is maximum. Plus the plane is so cool.

That, and a bunch of nice people dying young of cancer (Carl Sagan) or accident, when Jean Marie Le Pen, that old asshole, is still healthy aged 85.

Walter Rubarth is smashed by a shell while crossing the Meuse with its platoon. No bridgehead, no rush to Abbeville, no Dunkirk pocket. Paris is not taken, France stay in the war. And a sicle is blunted.

President Raymond Barre in 1988, or Michel Rocard instead of (crook) Mitterrand in 1981. Pompidou lives longer, seeks a second term, should be around 1976. Mitterrand win in 1974.

More to come probably...