How much of a wank was OTL?

The better you understand the period, the more plausible you realize every major historical event was.

In any case, saying OTL wasn't plausible really doesn't compute because it's the only TL that we know to have actually happened, so it's the only criterion we have to judge the plausibility of an ATL.
Agreed. Most seemingly crazy occurrences in history were not unprecedented.

Mongol conquests were preceded by thousands of years of nomadic and Turkic expansion setting up khanates that the Mongols would later unite. All of which descended from the Gokturk Khaganate. The Mongols themselves would partially assimilate to the Turkic tribes they conquered. The specific campaigns by Mongol generals seem extraordinarily lucky but when you look at the historical process they represent it's really not that surprising.

Alexander the Great's conquest was preceded by almost a thousand years of Greek trade, piracy, and mercenary service in the Near East from Ancient Egypt to the Ionian Revolt and Xenophon. Alexander conquered a Persian empire that used substantial Greek forces in its military, had substantial regional decentralization and faced unstable dynastic politics. Some claim that Bactria was already a remote region to which Persia had deported Greek prisoners of war, the Achaemenian's "Siberia", which also explaining how quickly the Greeks seem to have set up a power base in Bactria after the conquest.

Ottoman expansion occurred in a context of a Middle East already dominated by Turks and Turkic peoples for multiple centuries. The Islamization and spread of Turco-Persian culture was hundreds of years in the making. Turkish Anatolia itself had previously been at least nominally united while Asia Minor was previously the center of powerful empires. Further, the core territory of the oldest Ottoman state was the territory of Nicaea which had previous successfully restored the Byzantine Empire.

And so on. Of course these are already oversimplified explanations but everything is a part of a larger trend. That being said, I still believe that the Great Man Theory is the main driver of history, as it is the only way I can logically explain the success of Danny DeVito.
 
Well, Japan did go kind of nuts in WW2. I remember I first saw a map of the Imperial Japanese Empire I had to go online to actually see if Japan actually owned all if those little inlets in the Pacific.
 
The better you understand the period, the more plausible you realize every major historical event was.

Sometimes this is indeed the case; hell, I can personally attest to this. But not always, and sometimes it can quite well be the opposite: again, the Mongols give us a good example of the latter.

OTL is proven to be possible, because it happened. But possible does not necessarily mean most plausible. Many freak occurrences happened IOTL.

Yep.

Five days ago a professional footballer (Emiliano Sala) disappeared in a plane voyage, and most likely has perished. OTL now includes this outcome. Can you really argue that the most plausible outcome for the life of this footballing star was to disappear in a plane at age 28? I think a timeline in which he survived would have been more plausible.

Right. Of course, that's not to say that this particular event was implausible-not necessarily. But even in a case like this, it does seem at least potentially arguable that it may have been more plausible for him to survive.

It goes the same point Intransigent Southerner made and Lord_Vespasian illustrated, in a vacuum some event can look freakish and improbable, when you research deeper, link the causes, background and realities such "freak incidents of history" makes a lot of sense.

Sometimes, yes. But again.....this isn't always true.

Mongol conquests were preceded by thousands of years of nomadic and Turkic expansion setting up khanates that the Mongols would later unite. All of which descended from the Gokturk Khaganate. The Mongols themselves would partially assimilate to the Turkic tribes they conquered. The specific campaigns by Mongol generals seem extraordinarily lucky but when you look at the historical process they represent it's really not that surprising.

To add to my point about the Mongols, yes, I was already aware of this.....but at least in this case, even after researching deeply, one could still hardly be faulted for being genuinely shocked by just how far they managed to go OTL; at one point, as some of us are aware, they even successfully held territory as far west as today's Poland and Romania. That could easily have not been the case-hell, perhaps it may have been as just as likely that they hold on past the Urals by little more than, say a hundred, or 200, miles!
 
I think OTL is more screw than wank. Wave after wave of dodgy plagues, diseases and genocidal maniacs stop each civilization progressively improving and getting better.
 
I don't think we're talking about

"Our timeline is one of the ones that fundamentally don't make rational sense",

which yeah, perhaps doesn't make sense (because everything that happened should be rationally explicable, even if it proves beyond our ability to gather enough evidence), so much here as perhaps

"Were unpredictable, contingent events more important in giving massive success of certain political/religious/other groups in our timeline much more than we'd expect for a random iteration of history starting in X BCE/AD?".

Which is impossible to know really though - I think we'll see progress in our ability to sort out the influence of deep forces in history from contingent events, but we'll always face the problem that, barring massive simulations that effectively recreate history on some impossible to imagine future computers, we'll always only have one world to work with on the data side of things.
 
History and life are full of black swan events. Events that no one predicted before they happen, but everyone claims in hindsight were easily predictable.
 
3. The Yongle Emperor was the outlier, not the rule, and these voyages weren't to expand, conquer, explore or colonize, it was to establish tribute. China never had any interest in colonizing, especially not across the Pacific when there's South East Asia and Indonesia right there.

All make perfect sense in connect in context
But even when the new more establishment and old school emperor saw that Zheng He’s voyages has been successful, maybe a smaller tribute fleet the next round?
 
I think we can assume that it was not a likely outcome. A lot of strange things happened that day - the pilot was changed for some reason, the flight was delayed about 10 hours, and then the pilot decided to leave in the evening during poor weather. If any of those are different, it is likely he reaches Cardiff. But even with them, the plane probably is more likely than not to make it across the Channel successfully.
What what are the circumstances surrounding all those "strange things"? It is like a said: in a vacuum ("can he cross the channel") the outcome ("wew, he died") looks absurd and making a successful crossing (that a lot of people do) seems likely, but as you point out a lot of stuff happened, and those should be taken in consideration, it may not be a "take one element and the outcome changes". Why Isabella went with Columbus' mind-nobbling stupid idea? Because Castille was cut off from the main route south of Africa by Portugal under the treaty of Alcaçovas, Columbus proposal was a possibility that Isabella had to gamble to win big money (a often underlooked element on Age of Sailing on this board), just to point out a oft talked "implausible/ASB event in OTL".
I'm not saying OTL is absolute and couldn't be changed, but well... what is more plausible: Something that you it happened or something you can't know that could've happened? OTL has an unfair advantage over AH due to this fact, but you can speculate what ifs and support it with your knowledge and understanding of the historical era, but to postulate that a TTL event is more "plausible" than OTL you can fighting a gunfight with no guns.
 
I'm not saying OTL is absolute and couldn't be changed, but well... what is more plausible: Something that you it happened or something you can't know that could've happened? OTL has an unfair advantage over AH due to this fact, but you can speculate what ifs and support it with your knowledge and understanding of the historical era, but to postulate that a TTL event is more "plausible" than OTL you can fighting a gunfight with no guns.

Fair. But my larger point is that we cannot definitely say that OTL is the most plausible, just because it happened. There was only one trial. In science you would need to replicate the experiment before you could conclude about how likely the outcome is.
 
History and life are full of black swan events. Events that no one predicted before they happen, but everyone claims in hindsight were easily predictable.
Like in Australia?
I always found so Hillarious that in english yo Say aomething Is Imposible they Speak about the Black Swan, and then they do and found a continent full of those,
 
Christianity and Islam. A majority of people now on Earth at least claim to be adherents of one or the other.

Why is this a wank? Because the history of East Asia and India shows that it would have been perfectly possible for traditional "pagan" religious beliefs to remain predominant, supplemented by philosophies that contain higher religious elements (even Buddhism doesn't go much into speculation about the supranational). So there was nothing inevitable about two universal monotheistic (Christians at least claim to be monotheistic) religions dominating half the world.

Other strange features is that both originated from or were strongly influenced by Judaism (different versions from the one we are familiar with now), Christianity was inspired by a man who never had more than local notoriety and was executed before he reached middle age, and Islam first spread by Mongol style conquests from the Arabian peninsula, for the first and last time in history you got a nomadic empire not originating on the Eurasian steppe.
 
Christianity and Islam. A majority of people now on Earth at least claim to be adherents of one or the other.

Why is this a wank? Because the history of East Asia and India shows that it would have been perfectly possible for traditional "pagan" religious beliefs to remain predominant, supplemented by philosophies that contain higher religious elements (even Buddhism doesn't go much into speculation about the supranational). So there was nothing inevitable about two universal monotheistic (Christians at least claim to be monotheistic) religions dominating half the world.

Oh, stuff like that sure can be considered a "wank", though if we do so, it's on the level of variations of "Caesar" specifically being used for the name for a powerful ruler to aspire to it's. It's that person or that thing having that role, rather than there being such a person or thing.

That is, there was probably gonna be a "high religion" of sorts about, but that it should be monotheistic and that this is *important* to it (rather than the sort of "Oh yes, of course there's a supreme paramount omnipotent god, now let's get to the interesting bit" of many ancients and East and South Asian religions), is probably a detail which may be subject to a guess.

Islam first spread by Mongol style conquests from the Arabian peninsula, for the first and last time in history you got a nomadic empire not originating on the Eurasian steppe.

Technically speaking, the various Persian Empires originated in the Central Asian Turan, not exaclty off the steppe and I'm not sure we know about how many nomadic precursors there may have been to the Arabs which were within the fringes of the Middle East - the Hyskos are argued to be nomadic for instance, Akkadian nomadic origins are sometimes assumed.
 
But even when the new more establishment and old school emperor saw that Zheng He’s voyages has been successful, maybe a smaller tribute fleet the next round?
All Zheng He did was sail trying around well established trade routes that had been in use before Rome was a power in peacetime and asked a bunch of weaker states to give China tribute. They really didn't change much. I mean they're awesome, lots of records and helped connect the region, but China is so insanely wealthy that it was a drop in the bucket for them. Besides, if China went down an expansionist route, the military class would gain great power in the court, something the bureaucrats would never willingly accept.
 
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Like in Australia?
I always found so Hillarious that in english yo Say aomething Is Imposible they Speak about the Black Swan, and then they do and found a continent full of those,
Australia has White Swan events. We do everything differently.
 
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Christianity and Islam. A majority of people now on Earth at least claim to be adherents of one or the other.
Int he wank Judaism thread, it seems that it is being concluded that a monotheistic religion was ready to go primetime in the Mediterranean world. The Persians also already had Zorastrianism. So, the rise of Islam and Christianity makes perfect sense given that intellectual climate.
 
I know we need no evolutionary PODs, but honestly, macroevolution is the biggest wank ever. In all honestly, how many things had to go absolutely right for the first lifeform to 1. randomly come together, 2. have dna structures formed arbitrarily and yet actually work, 3. be animated, 4. not die? If this was a very easy process, we would see this happening all the time...which it doesn't. The fact we are posting here on this message board is the biggest wank of all.
 
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