At what point a butterfly could be considerated an ASB?

Hi

I was wondering: what would define a certain phenomena as an ASB?

For example, let take one of the favorite periods for alternate timelines: the Second World War.

Supposed that - in the middle of 1941, for example - there is a pandemic of Spanish/Asian-like flu? Such outbreak would an ASB? Or an outbreak of Ebola-like virus?

Would be an ASB if a meteor shower destroyed an important town in period, or a Tungunka-like Event?
 
Astronomical events as a PoD are ASBs, because they are beyond any type of human control at this point. However, should you be wondering what a reaction would be for something, it is a fair question in my opinion to ask outside the ASB forum; though would be best suited for ASB.

A type of flu springing out of nowhere is ASB. However, if the PoD is some guy exploring Africa and contracts a new type of virus from a critter not encountered OTL, it is a very fair PoD to have.
 

mowque

Banned
Astronomical events as a PoD are ASBs, because they are beyond any type of human control at this point. .

No they aren't. The random tumbling and delicate movements of asteriords and such could easily be different if we hit the 'reset' button.
 
No they aren't. The random tumbling and delicate movements of asteriords and such could easily be different if we hit the 'reset' button.

But nothing would change it from OTL, because everything up until this point has been an unknown chain of events. Anything past this point can be speculation. Unless we prove that the random movement of electrons is somehow significant from anything outside a microscopic standpoint.
 
A major outbreak of a Spanish-flu equivalent in 1941-1944 really wouldn't be ASB at all---frankly, it's almost a surprise that given the opportunity, that no such massive outbreaks did occur. The Soviet Union provided an excellent bioweapons lab for Nature during those years---lots of hungry people, plenty of bodies---even plenty of trenches and improvised fortifications.
 
Though it's not always used like that by people on this board, an ASB is supposed to be a distinctly supernatural/paranormal/scifi event. Aliens, magic, or time travel.
 
So, an sudden outbreak of an infectious disease would not be an ASB POD, but a meteor strike (like Tunguska) would? That would be the bottom line?
 
So, an sudden outbreak of an infectious disease would not be an ASB POD, but a meteor strike (like Tunguska) would? That would be the bottom line?

As long as it isn't too much of a crazy coincidence, any plausible act of god type event is acceptable. For instance, having an asteroid destroy Demoines on June 3, 1956(or any other randomly chosen date) would be acceptable, but having a comet hit the Allied invasion force just before they are about to attack Normandy would be considered ASB. Also, if you can show your work on whatever the POD is would also help, just having an airborne strain of Ebola hit the earth in 1918 with no real rhyme or reason as to how it got that way or the way it spreads(at least initially) just sounds like you made some magical doomsday virus up, but if you can show how it mutated into its present form in a scientifically plausible way, it would be acceptable.

Honestly, if you're looking for a plague to hit during WWII, you could just have the Nazi's or Japanese decide to get involved in bio-warfare and then have the viral agent get out of hand. Hardly beyond the realm or realistic possibility.
 
Part of the problem is that we have nothing between 'normal butterflies' and ASB (requiring something impossible without intervention).

In practice we have a group of stuff in the middle which isnt impossible, just so unlikely as to require winning the lottery to be an easy repeatable excercise by comparision.

Maybe we need SASB's (Statistical Anomaly Space Bats :D)
 
Honestly, if you're looking for a plague to hit during WWII, you could just have the Nazi's or Japanese decide to get involved in bio-warfare and then have the viral agent get out of hand. Hardly beyond the realm or realistic possibility.
The Japanese did get involved in bio-warfare: 'Unit 731'.
 
So, an sudden outbreak of an infectious disease would not be an ASB POD, but a meteor strike (like Tunguska) would? That would be the bottom line?

It's ASB if it happens at such a convenient time that it's a plot device, rather than a what-if study. For asteroids, it might be reasonable to change a near-miss to a hit (see http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/pods/natural_disasters/asteroid), but not to have a random one strike from the blue amid some other important historical event (i.e. the Normandy Invasion as another posted suggested). Similarly with epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes etc.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
So, an sudden outbreak of an infectious disease would not be an ASB POD, but a meteor strike (like Tunguska) would? That would be the bottom line?

That's a pretty good summary. Now the infectious disease should make sense, so having AIDS become airborne could be an issue, but AIDS making the monkey/chimp to human leap decades or centuries earlier is a reasonable POD. And anytime there is a war or famine, it is reasonable to see an appearance of the third horseman (disease). So for example, in WW2, an return of any of the major epidemics would be reasonable, as would the outbreak of a severe form of flu in the ACW.

Also, if you can show your work on whatever the POD is would also help, just having an airborne strain of Ebola hit the earth in 1918 with no real rhyme or reason as to how it got that way or the way it spreads(at least initially) just sounds like you made some magical doomsday virus up, but if you can show how it mutated into its present form in a scientifically plausible way, it would be acceptable.

This has a couple of good points. First, with extra research and writing, you can make an ASB just a POD with some butterflies. I wanted to write a TL examining what if the "Germans had twice as many U-boats in WW1 and a doctrine to use them". I could simply have started my TL with this sentence in the ASB section. But I wanted to do it in the post 1900 section, so I had to rewrite the POD 3 times and move it back to 1900 instead of 1914. I also switched from twice as many subs (too many butterflies) to having subs with much more experience crews (captains have 5-7 years experience as an officer on a sub compared to under 2 IOTL).

Second, the disease example he list is a good one. I had to look at this in my ATL due to major changes in Africa. So lets look at some diseases.

1) Ebola - ASB as far as I can tell. Low human to human contact, rapidly kills, and carrier by tropic bats. Hard to see TL with tropical bats infesting France.

2) Malaria/Yellow fever - Very easy. Mosquitos already live in Europe, USA, so a handful of people moved around combined with wartime interruption of mosquito control.

3) Small Pox, Mumps, other like disease - Easy to spread round, so if one wants too, easy to add to TL.

4) AIDS - Spread too slow to be notice. AIDS suffers would not last long in days before modern medicine, at least once the immune system is compromised. Have to be a long TL.

5) Typhus - Was in Serbia, Poland, Russia. Real easy to see major outbreaks in France, Belgium, Italy.

When you have a POD that is pushing ASB, you have to do more work to keep it non-ASB.
 
Astronomical events as a PoD are ASBs, because they are beyond any type of human control at this point. However, should you be wondering what a reaction would be for something, it is a fair question in my opinion to ask outside the ASB forum; though would be best suited for ASB.

A type of flu springing out of nowhere is ASB. However, if the PoD is some guy exploring Africa and contracts a new type of virus from a critter not encountered OTL, it is a very fair PoD to have.

What about earthquakes? Obviously not scale 10 in places where there are no major fault lines but take a historical EQ and move it back or forth a few years.

Ditto for volcanic eruptions.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
What about earthquakes? Obviously not scale 10 in places where there are no major fault lines but take a historical EQ and move it back or forth a few years.

Ditto for volcanic eruptions.

IMO, weather, asteroids, volcanoes and earthquakes are ASB. If you are doing a major TL, ask a moderator in a PM.

If man can change something, it is not ASB. If only god can change something, it is ASB. So unless you TL involves using nuclear weapons to trigger a volcano, I don't see how to avoid the ASB section. Disease are easy to change because it only takes person X dying before he spreads the disease to the second victim to stop a pandemic. We don't know who, but some had the first case of the Spanish Flu from an animal, and if he had died before he became infectious then the epidemic would have been avoided. Likewise, there are probably many epidemics that did not happen because trapper X who was bitten by a flea with the plague died before he could make it back to his village.
 
It's ASB if it happens at such a convenient time that it's a plot device, rather than a what-if study. For asteroids, it might be reasonable to change a near-miss to a hit (see http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/pods/natural_disasters/asteroid), but not to have a random one strike from the blue amid some other important historical event (i.e. the Normandy Invasion as another posted suggested). Similarly with epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes etc.


What MB Rabbit said.

There are accidents, and then there are very convenient accidents.
 
IMO, weather, asteroids, volcanoes and earthquakes are ASB. If you are doing a major TL, ask a moderator in a PM.

If man can change something, it is not ASB. If only god can change something, it is ASB. So unless you TL involves using nuclear weapons to trigger a volcano, I don't see how to avoid the ASB section. Disease are easy to change because it only takes person X dying before he spreads the disease to the second victim to stop a pandemic. We don't know who, but some had the first case of the Spanish Flu from an animal, and if he had died before he became infectious then the epidemic would have been avoided. Likewise, there are probably many epidemics that did not happen because trapper X who was bitten by a flea with the plague died before he could make it back to his village.
It must be noted that human actions can have serious effects on earthquakes- beyond direct actions (as I recall, several fellows had a plan to, essentially, lubricate the San Andreas fault). Building a city takes a lot of material from one area and moves it to another area- it's certainly reasonable that, in a TL where Los Angeles remained a relatively small (by modern standards) city, the earthquake patterns would have been different. Random chance could hypothetically move a major geologic event several years one way or the other, especially because we know so little about the actual triggers of the event- it's entirely possible that Mt St Helens could have gone in 1978, but some chance events within the volcano itself postponed it to 1980. Or, perhaps chance events could have caused a more moderate eruption, where a lot of steam and ash was released but the whole mountain didn't explode. We simply don't know enough to say how chancy those events were, and if we're truly rerolling the dice, it may well be that some event happened at a different time. (If a major event, like a large earthquake or a volcanic eruption occurs in OTL, it seems particularly likely that the cause of it would persist through ATLs, and thus something would happen at St Helens in the late-70s/earfly-80s timeframe, but the exact details are perhaps slightly mroe fluid- if the POD is 1970, odds are it'll be May 18 1980, but if the POD is 1920 or earlier, there might be a bit of variance.) Now, if you were to try a TL where it erupted in 1950 rather than 1980, that would be less likely with a POD later than, say 1400AD- but still possible, because again, we don't know how much randomness and chance is involved in geologic events.

And as regards astronomy- a meteoroid becoming a meteor(ite) is, perhaps, more likely than you credit- since so many rocks hurl around the earth so often, the tiniest of orbital wobbles could change the planet's exact position enough that a near-miss becomes a hit. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rocks of a few dozen feet across pass an astronomically negligible distance from the Earth every year, and dozens of rocks much larger pass incredibly close all the time. And since gravity is a universally-acting force, every change from OTL is a change in Earth's gravitational impact, which changes the gravitational forces in every object in the universe, even if the change is only slight. It would likely take little more than an altered global settlement pattern to create an orbital wobble big enough to cause this guy to hit Denver in 1972 rather than passing by entirely. And the farther back the POD, the more chance of some slight change- if Genghis Khan's forces killed a few hundred thousand more people, there would likely be millions of tons more biomass in areas where there weren't in OTL, which could shift the orbit of the earth ever so slightly such that, centuries later, the Tunguska object misses Earth entirely or, alternatively, hits in central China or western Europe. (Of course, these places would be almost unrecognisably different from their OTL counterparts that far after the POD, but big shifts do take time.)

Seismic and astronomical PODs in and of themselves are unlikely (until and unless we find out how random 'near misses' are), but after a given POD, such events will be similar (because there's not much humans can do about the general way of things) but they certainly needn't be exactly the same. (That said, I wouldn't fault anyone with a timeline where major events like these play out exactly as OTL. It's virtually impossible to predict what exact changes might take place, so unless it's something obvious, there's no real reason to bother shifting the events unless you really want/need to.)

Weather, on the other hand, is so variable you could easily make it a POD (provided it's not something too far out there- it's highly unlikely you'll find a typhoon hitting Sacramento, for example). Climate, on the other hand, while seriously affected by humans, tends to be affected in a moderately predictable way, and tends to be somewhat resistant to change by virtue of geography- however, if that geography changes...
 
All events that didn't happen are equally unlikely, people here place way too much emphasis on whether or not something is an ASB, and many of history's actual events are implausible and rather silly besides. ASB is easy shorthand for "a wizard did it" or "rocks fall, everyone dies". Its purpose is to say "Okay folks, ITTL Antartica doesn't exist / Abraham Lincoln loathes Portugal / Hitler can shoot Hitler-beams from his eyes, can we accept that and get on with our lives and my story?" So it's ironic that we rather get bogged down on whether something is or is not precisely an ASB - a term which lacks any true agreed definition.
 
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