u/grapp

I mean it’s just right there?

I was just watching a video where like a left liberal type person was talking about this and they were like "wouldn't it create a lot of problems to just tell all these established communities they have to go?" and I get that argument if were talking about somewhere like Canada or Australia where colonization happened multiple generations ago, but a lot of the major colonization in Westbank happened in the last handful of decades.

Like let’s say Aurelian never takes over and things just keep declining.

Like in the years of Rice and Salt timeline in the 16th century a chinese fleet gets blown off course on the way to conquer Japan then travels to America and back on the North Pacific Gyre. suppose something like that happened after the attempted Yuan Invasion of Japan, and then the Chinese just know there's another continent out there from the late 13th century onwards.

Like in the Years of Rice and salt a plague wipes out everyone in Europe around 1399 then the continent is re-populated by Muslims from the near east or North Africa. If that happened how much would contact with the Americas be delayed? Like given that was a direct result of Christians not wanting trade through Islamic lands to get access to eastern trade good?

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation brings warm water up from the equator to the North Atlantic. It’s the main reason Europe isn’t as cold as parts of Asia or norther America that are at the same latitude. It relies on salt water in the northern Atlantic being dense enough to sink and flow south, so it can (and has) been halted for extended periods by massive influxes of fresh water into the Atlantic. This results extreme temperature drops in Europe.

Suppose in 1166 and asteroid hits the coast of Greenland and results in a massive amount of glacier ice being melted or detected. The fresh water results in the AMOC fully collapsing until about 1350, and not returning to full function until 1550.

Like you know how in stuff like star trek or starwars space is basically just substituting for the ocean. Like with planets as the equivalent of island nations, humanoid aliens as different ethnic groups, and the space ships substituting for sailings ships. The Culture universe also mostly works like that and presumably because Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons as meant as deconstructions of stories that are told in universes like that. I wonder if Banks would have made the universe so …standard if he hadn’t established most of the basic world building in those stories? Like we see in stuff like Against a Dark Background and The Algebraist that he would create very non standard sci-fi settings.

so suppose in AD 8 a famine and then plague trikes Germania and it prevents the tribes from getting organized enough to do the The Teutoburg Forest ambush. 20 years later Drusus becomes emperor and decides to push the border even further into Germania in order the sure up his rule. Serendipitously this coincides with another period of famine and plague in Germania and the romans are able to take everything up to the mouth of the Jutland peninsula.

Rome conquering Germania is a popular POD for "Rome never fell" timelines because its assumed that would prevent northern incursions and those are what led to the fall of the west.

I'm thinking of something intermediate between the Mesa Falls eruption and the Huckleberry Ridge eruption. so lets say about 750 cubic kilometers of ejected material.

How would the various civilizations that existed at that point (Song China, the Abbasid Caliphate, the byzantine empire, the Khmer Empire, the post classical Mayans, etc) react to the climate disruption that would cause?

Robert didn’t really comment on that but it really shocked me. Today Musk has almost a trillion dollars.

lets say the black death is way worse and it prevents Eurasia from getting out of the middle ages and colonizing the rest of the world. What would have happened with native american agriculture over the last 534 years?

Like suppose the GOP don’t mange to fully get the rig in in time and/or the democrats just win too big for it to stop them taking back the house. Will that have the effect of making less informed left of centre people think the ruling wasn’t actually a big deal since the democrats won anyway?

Like suppose a disease wipes out 99.8 of the human race and humanity is reduced to like 16 million people wondering among the ruins. Do you think those survivors would recreate something like capitalism once they got their shit together and started rebuilding?

it seems like most of the cases where an LLM has encouraged someone to do something dangerous to them self or others its after an extended time period where the person has been interacting with a particular instance without resetting it.

Like those people on UseNet in the 90s were tricked but only because they didn’t know it was possible they were speaking to a computer. Like think about it, if you don’t know you might be speaking to a computer you’re just going to assume it’s a human acting a bit off almost no matter what they say.

I feel like around the time he died the mainstream narrative was “yeah he was a bit weird but non of the accusations were proven in court so we can just ignore it”. Now I think it’s much more common for people to assume he was probably guilty. Is that because we learned much new stuff, or was it just stuff like MeToo changed the culture (at least for left leaning people)?

like this came up in both the Jimmy Savile episode and the Oprah episode and it makes me a little uncomfortable because I don't want to say if you're sufficiently awful its ok for us to question claims like that.