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I know evolution is ASB, but HIV evolved recently, in the 1920s, in specific circumstances, namely Leopoldville's brothels with rapid turnover of sex workers; without such turnover, SIV would not spread enough to evolve into the nastier HIV. If that did not happen, what would the effects be...

Can we have a discussion of which recent technologies could have been butterflied away, and conversely which technologies that failed or were not developed could exist? Examples: 1. It's practically a trope of the genre that airships could be the dominant mode of air travel if it weren't for...

I put this in before-1900, because by 1900, the writing was already on the wall for the core democratic states. My question is, with a reasonably late POD (say, post-1700, so the Industrial Revolution happens on schedule), how far can you move suffrage, in either direction? We know that, as an...

On Twitter, a few people were discussing an Israeli equivalent of The Man in the High Castle, involving a scenario in which Israel lost the war, and the Jews now live under an Arab regime. They specifically discounted The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which takes place in a Jewish enclave in...

I have mentioned in a few threads, both here and on ASB, that I'm enamored by the reversed-continents map, based on an XKCD strip. I am trying to run an RPG set in that world in the Age of Sail; if I choose to run it here, I will post more details in Shared Worlds (and if I choose not to, I'll...

In our Western-dominated world, the way we think about distribution of power within countries is based on Western nations of democracy and autocracy. At one end, we have absolute monarchies; at the other, we have countries with parliaments, regular elections with universal franchise, an...

Are there any alt history scenarios here involving different ways language could have evolved? One example, by someone who is clearly steeped enough in the lingo to know what OTL and ATL mean, is Alternese: conlanger Justin B Rye wrote a TL in which the Norman invasion of England failed, and...

Bengal was possibly the most developed part of India on the eve of British colonialism. Dhaka had a million people, and the geography of the region is similar to those of the Netherlands and the Yangtze Delta. That said, wages were low, unlike in the Netherlands or Britain or the Yangtze Delta...

For a while I've had an idea for a TL in which Genghis Khan died before he could unify the Mongol states; with no Mongol Empire, the Southern Song and the Abbasid Caliphate kept developing, and industrialized in the 14th and 15th centuries. I am not going to write it down in too many details...

Mirroring the alternate warships and warplanes threads, I'm curious what alternate political factions (parties, ideologies, alliances) could be like. E.g.: - Could there be a stable political division that doesn't correspond to that of any modern first-world democracy? Like maybe an elite vs...

Two years ago, I played in a LARP called Temptemus Papam, simulating a fictional 1500 papal election. I was Henry VII. In the game, alliances went differently from in OTL: the most important two changes are that I negotiated a marriage alliance with France, which with legal changes would allow...

I know it's been discussed before, but in an ATL where there was no Mongol Empire, could Song China industrialize? We know it had many features that favor industrialization: high wages, coal production, relatively low military spending, a relatively limited government, relatively fast...

I'm not sure it's the right place, but I have an almost-done timeline with POD in 1500; I've written history going in the main (=Anglo-French political history) through the late 1970s plus some short histories of the North American cities, since their names and economies are changed from OTL...

I'm thinking of a timeline in which the Holocaust didn't happen although almost everything else did, and its effect on Jewish history. [The effect on rest-of-world history would be fairly small: the pivot from fascism to communism as the main evil for the US to fight would have happened just...