How about Patrice Lumumba? The POD could be that he successfully gets the US and UN to get Belgium to stop supporting the Katangans so he doesn't turn to the USSR. He then manages to make Congo-Kinshasa into a semi-functioning nation-state instead of the horrorshow that was Mobutu's Zaire.
AHC: Most Impactful Centennarian
- Thread starter DominusNovus
- Start date
Maurice Duplessis lives until 1990 and prevents/stifles the Silent Revolution.
Mohammad Mosaddegh lives until 1982 and, as a wheelchair-bound figurehead, is able to push the nationalist faction to the forefront of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Ngo Dinh Diem lives until 2001 depending on how he avoids his OTL fate this could be huge or minor.
Mao Zedong lives until 1993, China is royally fucked.
Tupac lives to be 100 and prevents the rise of mumble rap.
Mohammad Mosaddegh lives until 1982 and, as a wheelchair-bound figurehead, is able to push the nationalist faction to the forefront of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Ngo Dinh Diem lives until 2001 depending on how he avoids his OTL fate this could be huge or minor.
Mao Zedong lives until 1993, China is royally fucked.
Tupac lives to be 100 and prevents the rise of mumble rap.
Mao lives until 1993...
First, a longer Cultural Revolution. It's likely the Gang of Four would make him into a figurehead in his last years, but before then they would have destroyed roughly half to two thirds of Chinese relics. So ruins everywhere if you're lucky.
Second, large scale purges a la Stalin. You might result in a hardcore Maoist leadership, with reformers like Deng Xiaoping dying earlier.
Third, somewhere down the line, some provinces will revolt. That triggering point might not even have to be Tibet or Xinjiang. Guangxi is one that comes to mind.
Fourth, any combination of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, Portugal might do an intervention.
Fifth, China might collapse. The nation will not be able to support its own population, since high birth rates are to be expected in an agriculture based economy.
As to Tupac, he doesn't even need to live to see 100. He was 25 when he died in 1996. Extend his life by 25 years, and mumble rap would be strangled at its birth.
Or Malcolm X living to 100.
You also need to extend Notorious B.I.G's life.
The more I read about communist China, the more I think that Deng was not so much a reformer as he was pragmatic enough to bow to reality. The moment Beijing let up pressure on the population anywhere, a vibrant underground economy formed, literally within days. Even in the height of the Great Leap Forward (of which Deng was quite an avid supporter at the time), formalized black markets were forming in every urban center.
If Mao was still around, that pragmatism would have led Deng to tow the party line for longer.
More time to screw up his legacy. A lot of iconic figures are iconic because they died at the right time.
Franz Joseph surviving to 1930 would be interesting, though he ceased to be relevant almost from the moment that he declared war in 1914. The various peoples of Austria-Hungary would probably still feel some affection for him, but sentiment can't hold an empire together, and even German-Austria will still want to lay the blame on the Habsburgs in order to exonerate them of blame.
Like Charles I (and IV), I don't think there's a thing in heaven or on earth that will be able to persuade FJ to abdicate or even voluntarily "relinquish responsibility". My personal interpretation is that he'll refuse to exile himself to Switzerland and be forced out by soldiers at gunpoint.
Since Switzerland only let Charles and his family stay if they would not engage in political activity, probably FJ would be forced to go to Madeira (just as the Allies forced Charles to Madeira after his failed attempt to take over Hungary). If not already senile by then, he would probably live out the rest of his days there and then die.
Potentially FJ's survival into the Interbellum would make it more likely that Central Europe would remember the Habsburgs. Potentially - though this is a stretch - it might lead to a Habsburg Restoration in Austria after WWII.
Like Charles I (and IV), I don't think there's a thing in heaven or on earth that will be able to persuade FJ to abdicate or even voluntarily "relinquish responsibility". My personal interpretation is that he'll refuse to exile himself to Switzerland and be forced out by soldiers at gunpoint.
Since Switzerland only let Charles and his family stay if they would not engage in political activity, probably FJ would be forced to go to Madeira (just as the Allies forced Charles to Madeira after his failed attempt to take over Hungary). If not already senile by then, he would probably live out the rest of his days there and then die.
Potentially FJ's survival into the Interbellum would make it more likely that Central Europe would remember the Habsburgs. Potentially - though this is a stretch - it might lead to a Habsburg Restoration in Austria after WWII.
Would that change much if anything? Longer living Mao if not at age of 100 would be much more impactful.
Deng is out of the picture by 1992. Given that OTL he died in 1997, at most, he would only exert a larger influence on Jiang Zemin, himself stepping back by 2002.
With a stretch, Deng might be able to exert *some* influence on Jiang's successor (likely to be Hu Jintao in any case), but even that would be overshadowed by Jiang's.
I'm currently (and somewhat intermittently) writing a timeline where Walt Disney quits smoking very early on and lives to be just shy of 101. *cough* shameless self-promotion *cough* It's... interesting, to say the least, and the butterflies extend far outside of the world of animation. Walt Disney by his forties/fifties was utterly disinterested in making movies. He turned to theme parks next, and I see him very likely to go into the field of video games after that--the next logical step of immersion into the worlds he created. He'd also probably keep Disney out of it's Dark Ages of the 1970s and 1980s. (He does all this and more in my timeline).
I'd like to see what R J Mitchell living would do for the British Aviation industry, especially if he got together with Barnes Wallis.
Extending the life of scientists/inventors is probably more impactful than political figures, since a scientist can keep making discoveries well into old age, while a politician's impact on the world mostly ends when they leave office. Some possibilities:
Charles R. Drew (1904-2004): IOTL created the modern blood bank. Had he lived longer he probably would have been the first African American to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine
Albert Einstein (1879-1979): Spent most of the later portion of his life looking for a unified field theory of physics, maybe he could have been successful with an additional quarter-century
Robert Oppenheimer (1904-2004)
John von Neumann (1903-2003): Prolific mathematician and computer scientists, could have accelerated the development of computing
Charles R. Drew (1904-2004): IOTL created the modern blood bank. Had he lived longer he probably would have been the first African American to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine
Albert Einstein (1879-1979): Spent most of the later portion of his life looking for a unified field theory of physics, maybe he could have been successful with an additional quarter-century
Robert Oppenheimer (1904-2004)
John von Neumann (1903-2003): Prolific mathematician and computer scientists, could have accelerated the development of computing
Charles de Gaulle (1890-1990). He's pretty much the founding father of the modern French Republic and his exit from French politics, while acrimonious, still didn't disqualify him from being influential and powerful beyond any office. His death, about a year after he left office, pretty much gave the nation a reason to forget about his exit and focus on his legacy. If we avert that, it would be interesting to see how he is seen in France, and how his attempts to neutralize American and Soviet influence in Europe while simultaneously preventing the UK from joining the ECC would play in France and internationally. I can see, if he could convince any elected officials to amp up reapproached with China, a potentially close Franco-Sino relationship that could end up undermining both the USA and USSR.
Another centennarian possibility for this ahc that I can think of is Tunku Abdul Rahman. In real life, he lived to 87, although, had he lived to 100 (until 2003 or 2004), one wonders how he will further propagate his views on moderation and react to the dismissal of Anwar Ibrahim by Mahathir in 1998.
How about bernhard Riemann (1826-1926) or Rosalind Franklin(1920-)? Rosalind Franklin would have received nobel prize in 1966..