What Could Have Been/Real Life

• This is, as can be seen below, the entire point of Alternate History.

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Arts & Entertainment

• Salvador Dali once asked a young Lorraine Bracco if he could paint her nude. She refused, thinking he was just some creepy old man.
• Amy Adams once worked at Hooters. She left before the famous uniforms became mandatory.

Politics

• If Adolf Hitler got that job as a painter, things MIGHT be a lot happier. He really wasn't half bad. Of course, World War I would have still ended the same way, the Germans would still have been pissed at the Treaty of Versailles, and instead of Hitler it probably would have been somebody else. It would be even more interesting if the Archduke of Austria-Hungary had never been assassinated, which was what caused World War I and in turn set the events in motion for World War Two. Although there are many other factors other than Franz Ferdiand's assassination which might've triggered it anyway, but they are too numerous and complicated to be discussed on this wiki. Leave it at that. Please.
  • Not to mention what if one of the 15 attempts to kill Hitler actually worked.
    • That one is an open question. Would the Germans surrender after losing their leader, or would they fight harder after losing their greatest liability?
• What if Leon Trotsky were leader of the U.S.S.R.?
  • What if Stalin had became a Priest like his mother wanted? Or, to put it another way, who would've aided the allies during WWII?
    • Or if Lenin didn't die to begin with?
• If Franz Ferdinand had become Emperor he could have completed his dream of transforming the Austria-Hungarian Empire into the United States of Greater Austria through a series of political reforms. This would have served the dual purpose of keeping the Empire together by giving the subject peoples a say in the parliament and giving a reason for the absorption of new overseas and southern European territories into the Empire as full members. This could have possibly averted the Balkan conflict that started the war.
  • Germany could have still lost the first World War, but had the war not been drawn out as long as it was, the Kaiser might still have retained power. The same goes for Tsar in Russia.
  • It wouldn't have broken out in exactly the same fashion, but it would almost certainly have exploded sooner or later. The unhappy fact is that Europe was basically divided into two armed camps eyeing each other narrowly, and that, as incredible as it seems to us nearly a century later, a lot of people wanted a war. There were several crises already that could have sparked a general war (Dogger Bank and Morocco, for example), and if Franz Ferdinand had lived to ascend the throne, it can't be assumed that he would have been left to reign in peace. (Among other things, the Hungarian aristocracy was bitterly opposed to Franz Ferdinand's plans for reform, as it would have significantly reduced their power over their portion of the Empire, much of which was comprised of the very minority groups that the Archduke wanted to raise up. At least one timeline on http://www.alternatehistory.com posits just such a scenario where the Magyar nobles rise in rebellion against Emperor Franz Ferdinand in the context of an alternate World War I.
    • And how does that situation differs from Europe ever since...wanted to write first council of Vienna, but maybe fall of Roman empire would be closer to truth. Except for different weaponry, of course. War was nothing but tool of politics afterall.
  • Even if Ferdinand was assassinated, what if Germany had never delared war on Serbia (setting off a chain reaction of allies on either side declaring war), and it had just stayed a regional conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia?
• What if the 22nd Amendment was never passed and the US President could still serve out as many terms as he'd like? Could we have had another President who would have done like Franklin D. Roosevelt and served three terms or more?
  • More then likely, Bill Clinton is the only President so far who could have pulled off such a feat. Harry Truman (who was exempt from the Amendment due to it being passed while he was in office) was wildly unpopular at the end of his second term and thus chose not to run for a third; Dwight D. Eisenhower (the first President to have been term limited) left office with both mediocre approval ratings and in poor health; John F. Kennedy was assassinated during his first term; Lyndon B. Johnson was eligible for a third term (He had served less than two years of Kennedy's term), but dropped plans for a second reelection bid due to his extensive unpopularity at the time; Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency during his second term; Gerald Ford was voted out after serving out the rest of Nixon's second term; Jimmy Carter was voted out after one term; Ronald Reagan left office with decent popularity, but was 77 and his health was steadily deteriorating; George H. W. Bush was voted out after one term; George W. Bush left office at the end of his second term as one of the most hated Presidents in history. In contrast, Clinton left office with extremely high approval ratings and was in good health. It can be assumed that if he were eligible for a third term, he could have easily defeated Bush and been reelected.
    • It remains to be seen where Barack Obama's health and popularity will stand at the end of his two terms in office, if he even wins reelection.
  • On that note, if that played out and Clinton was on his third Presidential term when the 9/11 attacks occurred, what would he have done differently than Bush?
  • If Clinton had served as President well into the 2000s, would the United States be in better shape today? Or, contrary to what his opponents say, are the US's problems today not entirely the result of George W. Bush's policies and the country would still be in shambles today regardless of who was in office through the decade?
    • It's safe to say that if Clinton had served more than two terms, at the very least the government wouldn't be facing the huge debt debacle it's dealing with today. Clinton kept the debt at a reasonable level throughout his two terms and had completely eliminated the Reagan budget deficits as well, as the US government reported surpluses for 1998, 1999 and 2000. And then Bush had the government back in the red by 2002.
  • On the topic of deficits, what if George H. W. Bush had fought harder against the Democratic-controlled congress and forced through harder budget cuts and denied their attempts at raising taxes, thus allowing for his reelection in 1992 and preventing Bill Clinton from rising to prominence?
    • What if Big Bush had simply overthrown Saddam Hussein in 1991 at the end of the Gulf War? Would the US have avoided the debacle in Iraq that plagued most of the 2000s, or would have the same mess occurred just 12 years earlier?
• Many people know that in the 1800 election, Thomas Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr tied 73-73 in the Electoral College, forcing a run-off election in the House of Representatives and the electoral system to be redesigned for the 1804 election. Fewer people know that the initial result in 1800 was in fact 74-72 in Burr's favor, because an elector from New York cast both of his votes for Burr, apparently on purpose. Fortunately, the rogue elector's double vote for Burr was forbidden by the constitution, and the New York state legislature re-assigned the second vote to Jefferson. Had the elector in question cast his second vote for anyone other than Burr or Jefferson however, his plan to get Burr elected as President would have gone through without a hitch since the vote wouldn't have violated any laws, and unless he just straight up refused to take the President's office, a Burr administration would likely have drastically reshaped the country's early history.
  • Samuel J. Tilden and Al Gore both won the Popular Vote, yet lost in the Electoral College. Had the college never been instituted in the first place, this would mean that Rutherford B. Hayes and George W. Bush would never have been elected.
    • Actually four candidates have received less popular votes but won anyway: Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and George Bush.
      • True, but in Gore's case, the margin of victory wasn't in the popular vote, but in the state of Florida. With the electoral vote margin at stake with an all-or-nothing system of allocation in place, Gore's margin of defeat was less than the attendance of a high school football game. There's a whole list of might-have-beens that could have changed the outcome with a single change: Bush's brother being the Governor, yet not dismissing himself from involvement in the subsequent Courtroom Antics; Florida's Secretary of State, responsible for all of the vote tabulation and certification, being a member of the Bush campaign and not dismissing herself; accusations of voter disenfranchisement; a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that halted the last-minute recounts; and so forth. For those who remember, every news channel on the planet was providing minute-by-minute updates of the victory margin down to the individual. Any change that added a number of votes equal to a paper route subscription would have changed the results of the Presidential election.
      • Don't be too sure. One important factor is the number of absentee ballots, and how/when they are counted. At the time of the 2000 election (and, perhaps, even now), absentee ballots were counted only if the number of absentee ballots exceeded the vote spread in a given area. Thus, if you have State A, where Gore leads Bush by 1,000 votes, and there are 1,100 absentee ballots, those ballots will be counted. However, if you have State B, where Gore leads Bush by 10,000 votes, and there are 9,900 absentee ballots, those ballots will not even be looked at. As a matter of fact, in 2000, there were six million absentee ballots that remained uncounted, and we have no way of knowing which way those votes went. Had the electoral college been abolished, and a national system of voting taken its place, those six million votes would have come into play, and we can only speculate as to the results.
    • Also another thing to keep in mind: Florida had initially been called for Bush after the first night; not by a large margin, but enough to not realistically be surmountable. The story goes that Bush had been told to expect a phone call from Gore announcing his concession, and in fact Gore was bare minutes away from doing so and was on his way to a press conference to announce that fact before results from other counties came in that plummeted Bush's margin of victory to the razor's edge. When the phone call came, instead of conceding, Gore told Bush his intention was to challenge the results. Imagine what would have happened if the results were an hour or so late and he had given up without a fight when there was a very real chance at victory. A very large What Could Have Been in itself.
      • Actually, the state had originally been called for Gore when the polls closed in most of the state at 7 PM Eastern Time. Significant because there were ten counties that traditionally had (and still have) Republican loyalties in the Central Time Zone, meaning that they were still in play. Granted, they only made up about 5-6% of the state's population (1.5 districts out of 23 or so), but it caused some voters from those counties to turn aside. Had that call not been made, perhaps the margin of votes referenced above could have remained significant, likely bypassing the court battles. This call was rescinded around 10 PM EST and the call for Bush was made after midnight.
    • Another What Could Have Been in the election were the two candidate's decisions to fight for, and challenge, recounts in certain counties and districts believed to be favorable to them. After the state was finally and officially called for Bush, Gore sued on behalf of the districts whose recounts were still in process. On the other hand, Bush countered that allowing an exception to these districts, whose recounts had missed the deadline, would have been unfair to the rest of the state (an invalid claim, because Florida's State Constitution empowers the Florida Supreme Court to "do whatever is necessary" [exact words] to clear up contested elections, including ordering recounts in only one or two counties. In short, Bush's lawsuit was based on utter bullshit and Bush had no standing to bring it before the Supreme Court, but the Republican-controlled Supreme Court heard it anyway). The Supreme Court ruled for Bush, naturally. Which leads us to That Other Wiki (down towards the bottom). Under this study, a full recount of every ballot in the state would have resulted in a Gore victory by almost any standard. However, with only a recount of the districts Gore was fighting for, the victory would have still gone to Bush. Had he argued for a full recount of the state's ballots, once and for all, rather than focusing on the ones he felt favored him, the Supreme Court would have had no equal protection-based reason to deny him and he would have been elected. The tremor you felt in the floor when the study was released was Gore's head hitting the desk on a cosmic scale.
      • More likely, there would have been a runoff election, since neither Bush nor Gore obtained 50%+1.
    • One final note: What might have happened to the development of the parties had Gore won the Presidency? In the eight years of Bush's presidency, the Democratic party, during the 90s dominated by center-left politicians like Bill Clinton, was swept up by a Progressive movement that galvanized the left wing of the party, famously signified by a photo of Michael Moore and John Kerry standing side-by-side on the podium during the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Had Gore and the center-left Democrats won the presidency, would the at-the-time Right-wing Republicans (who would later move to the center-right after the Bush years with the rise of the Tea Party movement) have possibly become more liberal in their leanings as the Progressive movement sought a foothold in the system? Would the Republicans have become a centrist party akin to the 90s Democratic party and the Democrats gone a more Conservative route? Or would the Democrats' alignment stay the same, and a new Conservative party risen to take the place of the Republicans?
  • Speaking of potential U.S. Presidents, Milton Friedman (a Nobel prize winning economist) believed that Donald Rumsfeld should've been on the Republican ticket in 1988 instead of Bush Sr. If that happened, the problems that Bush faced may have been avoided (according to Friedman)
  • Let's not forget... what if Dewey really did defeat Truman? Answers on this vary, as some regard him as the best President that the U.S. never had, while others feel that his refusal to commit to policies and seeming indecisiveness during the election would have made him a poor leader.
    • Dewey's non-committal campaigning style in 1948 was the result of poor advice from his advisers, who felt that all he had to do was show up in order to win the election. Had Dewey taken the same approach to campaigning in that election as he had done in the 1944 election (where he put much more effort into campaigning against the hugely popular Franklin Roosevelt), he would probably have utterly destroyed Truman in the polls.
    • Another question related to 1948 -- what if Harold Stassen had secured the Republican nomination instead of Dewey? During the campaign, Stassen openly criticised Dewey for not being aggressive enough in his campaign style and taking it for granted that he was going to be victorious. Stassen's subsequent history shows that he certainly wasn't lacking in spirit or determination, so he might actually have been the Republican's best bet for victory in 1948.
  • What if George W. Bush stayed a baseball team owner?
    • Then his brother Jeb probably would have become President.
    • A similar question, which has both political wonks and baseball fans wondering, is what could have been if George W. Bush had become commissioner of Major League Baseball? Bush made no secret of his desire to become commissioner and was told, according to former commissioner Fay Vincent, by then-acting commissioner (and current commissioner) Bud Selig that he was being considered for the position. Perhaps some of the same situations would have come up for both commissioner of baseball (such as the labor unrest of 1994) and President of the U.S. (such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001) regardless of whether or not George W. Bush held either position, but how these events may have been handled differently is certainly a question.
  • What if John F. Kennedy had followed the Secret Service's advice and left the bulletproof bubble-top up on the Presidential limo in Dallas?
    • Then he would have been toted as the asshole who started the war in Vietnam instead of Johnson.
    • He would have been impeached for sleeping with a Mafia leader's mistress, J. Edgar Hoover would have been the mob-controlled president, and all major cities would be abandoned because the USSR has a nuclear base in Cuba. Luckily, he went back in time and assassinated himself.
    • Although it might have affected Oswald's (or whoever's) aim, the bubble-top was not bulletproof and existed only to protect the occupants from rain.
      • So, were the Secret Service afraid that it was going to rain?
    • Also, JFK technically IS the asshole who started the war in Vietnam, or rather got the US in up to its neck. As the generation who practically canonized him dies off and their grandchildren start writing history, he'll get more public blame. (This Troper's history professor was genuinely perturbed when he realized the reason all his students in his Vietnam seminar could be so detached and cold-blooded discussing it was none of them had any sort of personal identification with it or the personalities involved and were looking at it the same way they looked at World War I--purely academic.)
      • The asshole who started the war in Vietnam was actually Eisenhower. The war began in 1955 after all. Kennedy saw Vietnam as a pain in the ass he didn't want to get involved in. A week prior to his death, he issued National Security Action Memorandum # 263 which withdrew forces from Vietnam. This order was later reversed by LBJ. A Kennedy survival scenario likely means no Vietnam War and Kennedy being blamed for losing a country to communism.
  • On the topic of Aaron Burr, what if Alexander Hamilton had taken their duel seriously? He missed on purpose and Burr killed him. Had this not occured, Hamilton, one of the best legal and financial minds of the time, could have very plausibly been one of the earliest presidents. Would he, for example, have put the Supreme Court into the situation created by Marbury v. Madison, which ended with the Supreme Court being able to overturn laws? Or would the entire system of checks and balances be completely different today?
    • Hamilton was not a native-born American (he was born in the British West Indies) and was thus ineligible to be President; it would've taken a constitutional amendment.
      • The constitution reads: "No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States." (Emphasis added) None of the early Presidents were born in the United States; they were born in the British colonies.
        • They were all born in the colonies that would become the continental United States. Technically the clause may have covered Hamilton, but most of the people with positions of power in early America considered Hamilton to be ineligible because of it.
        • Um, No. Alexander Hamilton was 1. A citizen of the US when the Constitution was signed 2. 35 for some years of his life, and 3. Had been a resident in the US for more than 14 years at the time of his death. He was clearly eligible for presidency, as much as George Washington.
• Ho Chi Minh repeatedly asked the United States for intervention in Vietnam after World War I, hoping to establish an independent democratic government styled after that of the US in the the French-controlled Vietnam. The USA found little interest in the plight of some far off Asian colony, and was not interested in antagonizing their French allies. Ho later turned to the Soviet Union and Communist China.
  • Similarly, Fidel Castro only turned to Communism after being rebuffed by the US.
• Speaking of Castro, what if Fidel had been drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1947?
  • The Pirates would still probably be on their way to their 20th consecutive losing season....
• Upon graduating from the University of Michigan, Gerald Ford (Who played center for the Wolverines) was offered lucrative deals to play for the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers. What if he took one of them and embarked on a career in the NFL?
  • Similarly, Ford won his congressional seat largely because incumbent Representative Bartel J. Jonkman didn't think the small-time lawyer posed a real threat to his seat, and thus ran a lackluster campaign. What if Jonkman hadn't gotten cocky and instead fought hard to defend his seat in the primary against Ford?
  • On top of that, in the 1950s Ford was asked to run for governor of Michigan and declined, as his ambition was to become speaker of the house. What if he had accepted and became Michigan's governor instead?
• In 1919 Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and was unable to convince the Republican-controlled Congress to let the United States join the League of Nations. Had it done so, it would have been able to influence the League's actions towards Germany and could have perhaps completely prevented World War II from happening.
  • What about Japan?
    • Even if Japan was still bold enough to attack the US without allies, it would have been put down a lot quicker without a European theatre to deal with. Though it's possible that the lack of war fatigue and reason to even develop the technology may have prevented the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan. Remember, Japan at its most psychotically arrogant extremes, never thought it could destroy the US - the Empire wanted to do enough damage to America's Pacific holdings to force it to sue for peace so it could access American controlled resources, especially petroleum. It may even have been possible that Isolationist America wouldn't care what the Japanese did to the rest of East Asia if its government wasn't itching for a war with the Axis, as long as they left the Philippines alone. And, in a darker take, if post-war Europe recovered far faster due to the League of Nations, most of East Asia may have been already part of various European Empires by the 30s.
    • It's not clear in this alternate history Japan would have ever attacked the US. As noted above Japan would have been without allies in this scenario, and moreover if the US were part of a larger peacekeeping assembly Japan would risk facing more than just the US, and Japan had no delusions about waging war against the entire Western World, at least not until the Eastern was firmly unite and industrialized. The biggest thing though is that if the rest of the world wasn't waging a massive war Japan probably would have had access to oil through other means, and they only ever attacked the US to gain access to pacific oil.
• In 1912, a large number of African Americans cast their votes for Woodrow Wilson hoping that he'd live up to his promises to support their issues. What did Wilson do after being elected? He further restricted the rights of African Americans, removed several of them from government positions they had held for years, and further increased segregation. When the blacks complained, he told them that "segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen." As a further insult to the African American voting base that helped him to his office, he also said, "If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it." The full segregation Wilson installed remained in place until Truman's administration. It is widely regarded that, had he not installed those policies in the first place, more equality for Blacks may have been gained much earlier. Nice Job Breaking It, Jerkass.
• What if William had lost the Battle of Hastings, or at least been forced into a draw?
  • There is no way it could have ended with a draw. William of Normandy had burned all his boats - literally - so that there could be no retreat. Also, the Normans were actually Vikings (or Norsemen) that had invaded Normandy and settled, adopting the French language and feudalism. The French Crown, in reality a fairly precarious monarchy outgunned by its own dukes, had accepted them as another duchy because they couldn’t get rid of them. With William defeated and all his warriors captured or dead, the King of France would have been looking retake Normandy for the Crown. There would have been no question of France ransoming or aiding any of the Norman invaders – it would have been keen to disown them and make peace with England as quickly and cheaply as possible. With its tired, battered army, England would be looking to make peace as well. Plus, there was a rather powerful contingent of Norman descendants in Sicily to worry about, not to mention Vikings still on the seas… If the Anglo-French peace talks had gone smoothly, talk might well have turned to long-term treaties and mutual assistance against Viking-derived invaders, and others. So we have the continuation of the Saxon rule in England, the dissolution of Normandy, and a serious possibility of entente cordiale starting back in 1066. And that’s just for starters.
• What if Hannibal had received the reinforcements he needed to take Rome?
  • On a related note, what if Attila the Hun had destroyed Rome?
  • On a further note, what if Valentinian III had not murdered Flavius Aetius so soon after he defeated Attila at Chalons?
• What if the USA and the Soviet Union had gone to war in 1962?
  • Class 1
• What if the Japanese forces at Midway had been a bit more prepared, and kept a few aircraft aloft?
  • They likely still get attritted to death in Guadalcanal, and annihilated in the Phillippean Sea 2 years later.
  • In addition, even if the Japanese had taken Midway as a forward base, the U.S. Army Air Force would have simply destroyed it with a B-17 raid from Hawaii, perhaps taking out the now-surviving aircraft carriers as well.
  • Even if the U.S. Navy had lost all of its carriers and the Japanese none (ie: inverting what actually happened), the sheer volume of manpower and industry available to the U.S. compared to what Japanese had, would mean that hypothetical defeat would've only delayed things.
• What if Alfred had lost the Battle of Ethandun?
• What if Lt. Petrov had listened to his computers?
  • Class 4
    • Wouldn't it be more like Class 3? Nuclear weapons are not generally targeted equally at all parts of the globe. The Minor and non aligned states would likely BARELY get hit, and while there would be environmental effects, I find it hard to believe that life as resilient as it is would almost cease to exist globally. Especially in the Southern Hemisphere where the Cold war was not as hot.
• If Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales had lived, Queen Victoria not only would never have been Queen, she never would have existed. Her father only got married to a respectable woman and had legitimate children because Charlotte died, and there was no heir to the throne. Before that, he had spent years cheerfully porking a variety of mistresses.
  • Perhaps more importantly, Charlotte's husband Leopold would never have become the first King of Belgium, nor would he have married Louise of France and fathered Leopold II, the founder and sole owner of the notorious Congo Free State. Leopold's exploitation of the Free State - which led to the creation of forced labour camps, the use of monkey meat infected with a simian virus to feed the labourers, the use of prostitutes to entertain the labourers so they wouldn't riot, an epidemic of syphilis that caused genital warts and encouraged the spread of other sexually transmitted diseases, and the eventual migration of the labourers and prostitutes to the new crowded colonial cities - is now considered to have been the primary factor that created the conditions for simian immunodeficiency virus to mutate into human immunodeficiency virus.
• What if the Civil War never occurred, but rather the US just let the North and South split apart?
  • Or, what would things be like now if they had resolved their differences without secession and war?
  • Or, what would things be like now if the 3/5ths compromise had failed, and instead of the United States we had two separate countries, one based on slavery and one based on enterprise?
  • Or, what would things be like now if everyone read and abided by Thomas Jefferson's original criticisms of slavery? Not least Jefferson himself...
• What if the Roman Senate hadn't assassinated Julius Caesar? Or, what if they had finished the job, i.e. had him formally declared a tyrant, voided his estate, confiscated his property and assassinated active supporters such as Mark Anthony as well?
  • A bigger question is: What if Caesar had been sanctified as the Flamen Dialis? Originally he was named as the next in line for this position that had a high honor but an enormous list of dos and don'ts. These include not being able to stay outside the city walls overnight (or past a single night or past two nights depending on who's rules), not allowed to sleep away from his own bed for more than 2 consecutive nights, possibly not even allowed to touch things like iron or a horse. Basically had Caesar actually been installed into the office he would have never been able to become the political or militaristic powerhouse that lead to his eventual assassination. (Basically it was luck and political infighting by others and a massive change in power where people basically FORGOT that the city needed someone in the office and left Rome without a High Priest of Jupiter for what some scholars believe was close to 70 years).
  • What if Cicero managed to topple Mark Anthony and Octavian and restore The Republic?
  • Or, what if Antony and Cleopatra defeated Octavian at Actium?
• What if Richard III won the Battle of Bosworth?
• The ATF is technically named the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. The point in history where it did not end up referred to as FATE is sadly not known.
• What if Richard Nixon had chased up his appointment to the FBI? ^[1]
• Nixon was in Dallas on November 21 and 22 (he heard the news of JFK's shooting in the car on the way to Dallas airport). And on November 21, allegedly, Oswald left his house with his rifle, stating that he was going to shoot Nixon.
  • Speaking of Nixon, what if his cronies hadn't been stupid enough to leave tape on the door at the Watergate hotel?
• What is Tsar Nicholas II had taken Rasputin's advice and stayed out of World War I?
• What would have happened if the Manhattan project had slipped up, or Emperor Hirohito had decided (or been persuaded) to continue fighting to the bitter end? Operation Downfall - The Invasion of Japan. The invasion was set for the 1st of November 1945. The Imperial Japanese army and citizen militias numbered about a million, with enough equipment and weapons for two thirds and enough ammunition for half. The Imperial Navy didn't have enough fuel for its remaining handful of capital ships and was banking on the efforts of several hundred suicide speedboats. The Air Force had scraped together everyone and everything that could fly - some 10 000 planes - for kamikaze duty. The Allied armada would have numbered over 500 ships from all over the world, including several dozen battleships and carriers, with thousands of planes from said carriers and island airbases providing support for and escorting the invasion force itself - which would have numbered in the high hundreds of thousands of troops from all over the English-speaking world using American weapons and equipment. The coasts would have had to be abandoned because the sheer volume of Allied naval firepower would have been enough to obliterate any defensive lines within kilometres of the coastline, necessitating defense-in-depth on the order of, say, Iwo Jima. If the fall of Germany and Okinawa were anything to go by, the Allied forces could have expected house-to-house fighting interspersed with suicide attacks and civilian mass-suicides. Put simply, it would have been like Okinawa plus Stalingrad with a measure of Vietnam and Afghanistan. Both Afghanistans. Every bridge would have been blown, every road mined, every damn blown, every able-bodied person mobilised and sent to fight to the best of the Government's ability to sacrifice its people for itself and the Emperor. No-one used gas or biological weapons of mass destruction in WWII (even Nazi Germany, which has more than enough stockpiles to drive Russians into extinction, but instead wasted their resources on Awesome but Impractical superweapons) because they feared the reprisals. But with its back to the wall, the Empire just might have used it even though they only had the gear to protect half their troops - and never mind the militia or the civilians. Even if they hadn't used it first, the Allies (who did have adequate protective gear) were planning to use some - tear, mustard, chlorine or other - though they never had to make the call on what to use. If the atomic bombs had proved workable but had not forced Japanese surrender, there were plans to use them to support the invasion - they thought that waiting a day or so for the fallout to dissipate would be sufficient to avoid radiation poisoning and didn't issue protective gear for it. Allied High Command estimated half a million Allied dead and another half million with their lives messed up or ruined forever as a result. In short, more English-speaking people would have died, been maimed and/or scarred for life in Operation Downfall than in the entire War, or any war, before or since. HQ also expected five to ten million Japanese dead at the least, not accounting for government-sponsored mass suicide, gas attacks, disease and starvation resulting from the destruction of infrastructure. Whilst its not like Japanese people were in danger of being wiped out entirely - it's surprisingly hard to kill lots of people, even when you set your mind to it like the Nazis did - but it's not inconceivable that many tens of millions of them would've been killed. Just think of all the anime and manga that never would have been produced! Perish the thought!
  • We think. The Japanese were beyond war-weary at this point. It was probably the only reason why the occupation went as smoothly as it did (for an occupation, at least).
  • Apart from Showa's direct order to be nice. The entire population was on 1200 calories a day in August 1945, and it would have gotten worse if the US hadn't been minded to ship in all the food Japan needed to narrowly avert a true disaster in the next few months. However, this figure conceals big differences: a lot of people in the cities, like Tokyo, were living on less than 500 a day, whereas many in the countryside were actually getting by on 1500-2500 calories a day, i.e. what you need to survive and/or thrive.
  • In addition, what if the Japanese had gone through the Swiss rather than the Soviets when trying to negotiate peace talks?
• What if the Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers had been at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941?
  • The losses of battleships would not have been as great because some of the firepower would have been directed at the carriers instead. The long term fallout would have been for the US to pursue a more balanced course of warfare^[2] in the Pacific that would have incorporated more and better AA capability over the fleets and more aggressive use of battleships. Japan would have eventually gotten the massive, climactic naval clash it constantly pursued for the first half of the war, but they would have faced off against a larger, combined fleet of more modern US battleships and carriers that would have still scheduled the Imperial Japanese for a date with Davy Jones, but the battleships would have done most of the heavy work to include sinking the IJN Yamato^[3] and the rest of the Japanese heavy fleet. Also, we would have likely seen the deployment of the USS Montana class.
  • Following the end of the war, the USN would have held onto her heavy-armored fleets and her big gun firepower. As thick, battleship armor is easily able to shrug off any non-nuclear anti-ship missile or cruise missile, this would also prevent the sea-skimming anti-ship missile from becoming the dominant weapon in modern naval warfare. With a little ingenuity and heavy investment in S/VTOL fighter technology, we could have seen The Battlestar 's sea-faring counterpart, AKA the battle-carrier become a serious reality.
• What would have happened to the Republic of Colombia if Jorge Eliecer Gaitan wouldn't have been killed off?.
  • Or what would have happened if Luis Carlos Galán would have been assasinated too?.
• What if people had listened to Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamil? He defected in 1995, telling the world about the things Saddam's scientists had done with weapons of mass destruction. However, while that got the media attention, he also told the world, several times that Iraq had DESTROYED all its WMD. It took a war to prove he was right.
• What if the Colombian Exchange never happened? And Eurasia and the Americas were permanently separated. True, we'd have much less of the goods that the two sides have exchanged, but we'd also have FAR fewer diseases.
• What if Stéphane Dion had succeeded in his plans to set up a Liberal-NDP-Bloc Quebecois government in Canada after the 2008 election? The Conservative PM, Stephen Harper had parliament suspended for two months in an attempt to ward off a vote of no confidence, and in the meantime Dion was forced out of the Liberal leadership and replaced with Michael Ignatieff, who promptly abandoned the coalition plan and announced that the Liberals could win the next election outright... only for the 2011 election to result in a handsome Conservative majority and the Liberals being slaughtered. Had Dion held onto his position (or if Ignatieff had stuck with the coalition plan), then the last few years might have been very different for Canada.
  • At the very least, we most likely wouldn't have backed out of our Kyoto commitments, among other things...
• What if the United States' paranoid concerns about communism hadn't led to overthrows of leftist leaders and supporting or propping up right-wing rebels and dictators? Incidents such as working with the British to overthrow Iran's prime minister and installing the Shah whose tyrannical rule is responsible for the islamist fundamentalists coming to power. Or supplying and training islamist rebels in communist Afghanistan in a (successful) attempt to drag the Soviets into a military quagmire. Or supporting Pinochet's coup of Salvador Allende in Chile. And on and on... Not to say these situations would have turned out all sunshine and roses but would they, perhaps, be better without the US' fear of the creeping communist menace?

Science & Technology

• In both the book and the series Cosmos, astronomer Carl Sagan expresses his regret and frustration about how science, after being born before 500 AD and flourishing, soon became an ivory-tower intellectual thing which did not get shared, didn't improve the lives of the people, and was swallowed and scorned by superstition. Science died for a thousand years with the burning of the Library of Alexandria, which in both the book and the series he mourns with a quiet, heartfelt intensity.

"It was as if the entire civilization had undergone some self-inflicted brain surgery, and most of its memories, discoveries, and passions were extinguished irrevocably. The loss was incalculable. In some cases, we know only the tantalizing titles of the works that were destroyed. In most cases, we know neither the titles nor the authors. We do know that of the 123 plays of Sophocles in the Library, only seven survived. One of those seven is Oedipus Rex. Similar numbers apply to the works of Aeschylus and Euripides. It is a little as if the only surviving works of a man named William Shakespeare were Coriolanus and The Winters Tale, but we had heard that he had written certain other plays, unknown to us but apparently prized in his time, works entitled Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet."

• • He also speculates about what humanity could have been like if the Library had flourished and the Dark Ages had never come, about whether we'd be starborne by now.
  • It should be noted that Carl Sagan was not a historian, but a hard scientist. While much of what he says is true, and much was lost, there was science going on the entire time, much in the middle and near east, while even the west had some science the entire time that suffered under lack of resources and how bad the plagues hit Europe in 542.
• Charles Darwin originally intended to be a clergyman.
  • Being a clergyman probably wouldn't have affected things much. The cultural climate was such that anti-evolution sentiment didn't necessarily correlate with religion, and Wallace would still have published if Darwin didn't go on his trip. He probably would've had a harder time getting the initial ball rolling than Darwin, but the theory would have come out nevertheless. What would have been cool was if Darwin and Mendel had've met.
  • Also, if only Charles Darwin had cleaned out his desk. To explain: The greatest criticism of Darwin in his time was that he could not establish a mechanism for how individual variation came about, and this remained a valid criticism until the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work on pea plant genetics. Guess what? An unopened copy of Mendel's research paper on the subject was found in Darwin's study after the latter's death.
    • It might be because the manuscript was in Mendel's native German, a language that Darwin didn't know.
  • Even if Darwin had become a clergyman, it is likely the scientific community would have still developed the theory of natural selection. Alfred Russel Wallace was a naturalist who, working independently, developed a theory of natural selection very similar to Darwin's. In fact, it was Wallace's paper on the subject that prompted Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species. So its possible that the only real change would have been a different name in biology textbooks.
    • It's less the theory of natural selection that creationists object to and more the theory of common ancestry, although I suppose the two are intertwined, so it doesn't really matter either way.
  • Darwin may be given too much credit (if that's possible?), but a large part of his fame is how he collated huge amounts of data before publishing. For example, he wrote about how "half an eye" could be useful, yet the canard comes up from time to time in creationist arguments.
• As part of the Apollo Program, at one point NASA was considering using the hardware to send the astronauts on a Venus flyby. The first manned interplanetary flight could have happened nearly 40 years ago instead of--wait it hasn't happened yet, huh?
  • Considered doesn't mean doable. You could consider that jumping off a building onto a canvas tent might slow you down enough to survive with minor injuries, but chances are you won't. The Apollo vehicles only had just enough to keep the crew alive for the days it took to get to the moon and back. That won't apply for the months it would take for a Venus flyby. You'd have to scale up the vessel considerably to support the supplies needed for that trip, which is not that simple for space since every bit of weight counts. Now look at how big the Saturn V was just to send the tiny modules needed to get to the moon in space. Scaling that up for the huge vessel needed to do a flyby is too big, expensive, and impractical to attempt with 60s technology. Hell, it's still too big, expensive, and impractical to attempt it with today's technology.
• Three Words: Dinosaurs. Never. Died.
  • They didn't. We still have birds.
    • That troper means the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs never struck. Any TV series, films or books about this topic?
    • Here's something of interest.
  • If the Mesozoic extinction never happened, we would be small lemur-like animals, and the world would be populated by tiny, rabbit-sized sapient descendants of Troodontids. Think a small bird except with four wings, teeth, clawed hands, and a tail.
  • On a side note, what if the Permian-Triasic mass extinction never occurred?
    • We would be living in fear of Gorgonopsids.
• This troper recalls reading about a What If? historical paper (which I unfortunately cannot recall the title of) which points out how the Ancient Greeks had invented a steam engine, and the Ancient Persians had a functional railway system for transporting goods. If the two had not been at war, or had stolen each other's technology, the course of nearly three thousand years of history could have been radically altered.
  • Ultimately, very little would have changed. Contrary to what Civilization might lead some to believe, the Industrial Revolution was the result of a huge number of scientific, engineering, and social changes not a few isolated advances. A number of Classical peoples tinkered with steam power but none had the other, attendant knowledge to turn it from a novelty to a practical applications.
  • Also, slavery back then was so cheap that nobody had any interest in using the steam engine for any practical uses. It was just an interesting bit of mechanics. What if slavery had been outlawed in ancient Greece?
• What if the Big Bang never happened...at all?
  • Nothing ... ever.
• Cracked.com's "5 Scientific Advances That Should Have Changed Everything", which included:
  • What if the electric car had retained the foothold it had during the early 20th century, rather than falling into obsolescence once oil was discovered in Texas, making internal combustion engines king?
  • What if the U.S. government had taken Robert Goddard's rocket research seriously and fostered it, rather than ignoring it as nonsense? And what if that same government had taken Goddard more seriously when he told them that Nazi Germany was making serious inquiries into his rocket research (The government's reaction was basically "Fine! Let the Nazi play with their little rockets!")?
  • What if Henry Cavendish's work was discovered an implimented in his time (He came up with his own versions of Richter's Law, Ohm's Law, Coulomb's Law, Charles's Law of Gases and Dalton's Law in the Eighteenth Century)? Or more to the point, what if Cavendish wasn't a paranoid recluse who actually shared his theories with anybody?
• The Avro Arrow, Canada's first supersonic jet fighter, was highly advanced for its time but cancelled in 1959 and the blueprints destroyed, amidst a storm of controversy over its development costs, and after the Diefenbaker Government withdrew its funding for the project. If Diefenbaker had lost in 1957 and the project had proceeded in full, the Arrows would likely have served Canada for years and exported to various military powers. However, the long term trend would probably have been towards consolidation with other aircraft makers, given the escalating costs of designing and building jet fighters.
  • Alternately, they could still have been scrapped in favour of anti-air missiles and anti-missile missiles - everybody was scaling back or outright scrapping interceptor jets at the time - but the plans and prototypes might have survived.

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Back to What Could Have Been

1. ↑ Nixon attended an FBI recruitment talk at law school, and, following his graduation, applied to join them. He was well qualified, received excellent references, and passed the interviews, assessments, background checks and medical with flying colours. An appointment was made for him to come to Washington DC to be sworn in as a probationer. However, Nixon had made it known that he wanted to take his bar exam, and the FBI agreed that he should do so prior to joining, so the appointment was cancelled to enable this. Apparently, communications ceased at this point, with both Nixon and the Bureau believing that the other would contact them as and when they were ready to proceed. As it was, Nixon completed his bar exam successfully, and, hearing no word from the FBI, eventually accepted a standing job offer from a prestigious local law firm.
2. ↑ not as carrier-centric
3. ↑ very much within the capabilities of the North Carolina, South Dakota and Iowa class battleships