Based on a discussion im having

Are there any politicians during the ww2 era who could have replaced Roosevelt and accomplished what he accomplished? how about the civil war era for Lincoln?

I think Long could have done well for ww2

for the civil war ...maybe Winfield Scott if you stretch the definition of politlcan but I dont know if he could have maneuvered the 13th .Seward strikes me as too arrogant to unite the north.

How would it nations react? Would they tell actually history?

What if 1,000 Neanderthals were suddenly dropped into the world of The Lord of the Rings? How long could they realistically survive in Middle-earth, and how would the different races react to them? Would the orcs see them as prey, rivals, or potential slaves? Would elves view them as primitive but intelligent beings worthy of curiosity, or as dangerous intruders? How would dwarves and men respond to a species that looks human yet clearly comes from a far older branch of humanity?

The real question is whether the Neanderthals could adapt to a world filled with constant warfare, brutal climates, monstrous predators, and intelligent civilizations far beyond anything they ever encountered on Earth. Despite their immense physical strength, endurance, hunting ability, and experience surviving Ice Age conditions, Middle-earth is a far harsher and stranger world than prehistoric Europe. Wargs, trolls, orcs, giant spiders, and supernatural forces would present threats unlike anything they evolved to handle.

Could the Neanderthals form tribes, learn the languages of men, trade with dwarves, or even earn the respect of certain human kingdoms? Might some eventually become skilled hunters, scouts, or warriors within Middle-earth society? Or would their limited population, lack of advanced technology, and unfamiliarity with the politics and dangers of the world doom them to extinction within a few generations?

How long do you think 1,000 Neanderthals could last in Middle-earth — a few months, several decades, or could they actually establish a permanent civilization of their own?

If you were to remove a SINGLE person from American history, and there is no United States, who would it be?

My choice would be John Adams, even more than George Washington. There probably would be other generals that could have won.

What happens next? How does the ensuing civil war differ from the American Civil War? Which side wins (I'm assuming that the anti-slavery/pro-republican coalition has a strong advantage here, as they did in the US)? How is Brazil transformed as a country and society by 2026?

In a huge win for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and for human rights activists worldwide, the Israeli government of 1994, led by Labor leader and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, votes to grant full civic and humanitarian rights and equality to all Palestinians, as promised by the recently-signed Oslo Accords. Shockwaves ripple through Israeli society, and rightwing politicians (such as Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud) are infuriated, but the move is warmly-welcomed by international observers, and of course, by the Arab community in Israel. Note that, in real life, Labor PM Rabin was assassinated in 1995, as retaliation by the far-right for signing the Oslo Accords.

Unfortunately, hopes for world peace and equality are short-lived, as a few days after the Israeli vote, the White-led apartheid government in South Africa announces that negotiations with Nelson Mandela's party, the African National Congress, have abruptly and catastrophically collapsed. There will be no transition to democracy. A few weeks after this announcement, another horrifying bombshell drops—Nelson Mandela is to be re-arrested, the African National Congress is to be outlawed as a terrorist organization, and counter-insurgency operations against it are to begin immediately. Enormous riots break out across the country. Within weeks, the ruling pro-apartheid National Party declares a state of emergency, and proclaims total war against the African National Congress, and all of Nelson Mandela's movement.

What happens to these two countries next? What do they look like by 2026? How does this Great Apartheid Switcheroo affect Middle Eastern and African geopolitics more broadly?

Title, basically. You can remove a single person or alter realistically a single event to delay the discovery of the new world. How much can it be delayed?

I get the textbook answer, "they wanted to secede". But that goal wouldn't resolve primary grievances:

1. Can't imagine that, following a successful secession, the remaining US would suddenly feel obligated to better meet obligations under the fugitive slave act.
2. The idea the US would cede western territory to the Confederacy seems unlikely, thus you don't get an expanding slave market.

Elvis had a serious heart attack in 1977. What if he survived it and changed his lifestyle to a more healthy one. Would he be a washed up hasbeen nowadays or would still be popular?

Lately I have been seeing posts where Canadians say " we joined both World wars earlier than the USA did. Therefore we are morally superior to the USA." (Or something like that).

In our timeline, Canada was a self governing territory within the British dominion. Meaning that once London said they were at war, Canada was as well.

But in an alternate timeline when Canada became a confederation in 1867 the UK granted Canada its full independence. Meaning that whatever happened in London wasn't Canada's problem anymore.

Would Canada likely have jumped into the world wars as early, or would they have waited a little longer like the USA did?

i was studying the library of alexandria and came to wonder like would the world even look any different if the library hadn't burned down? if there was some incredible revelation in a scroll that was so groundbreaking- wouldn't it have been refrenced in another book? for something to be so important i doubt it was only in the library, it seems like a contradtiction to the significance of the book. so what do you guys think??

Mr. Seward wakes up on a cold night in 1867 and sees his folly. The deal between Russia and the US falls apart. Alaska is not sold to the Americans.

Fast forward to 1895, when Russia sees Japan as a growing threat on its eastern frontier—the Japanese have just defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War, and have vastly expanded its territory. The Russians opt to forge a new alliance with China against the expanding Japanese threat, and as a welcome-to-the-allegiance gift, offer to sell Alaska to China for almost nothing.

What happens next? How does this affect the Russo-Japanese War, which is coming up in a few years, and the Second Sino-Japanese War, which is coming up in a few decades? How does a Chinese-ruled Alaska develop, and how long are the Chinese able to keep the Japanese, Americans, British, etc. away from their new colony?

On September 11, 1951, four American passenger planes are hijacked. One is flown into the Empire State Building, another into the Chrysler Building, and a third into the newly-built Pentagon. The fourth plane crashes into a field in Pennsylvania, following a heroic intervention from the passengers.

Jamaat-e-Islami, a newly-founded Islamist militant organization based largely out of Pakistan, takes responsibility for the attacks, calling it retribution for American recognition of the newly-founded semi-secular government in Pakistan, and the newly-founded turbo-Zionist government in Israel. What happens next?

As the title implies what if IJN Musashi wasn’t sunk in WW2 and survived the war would it become a museum like the Iowa class battleships or would America force Japan to cut it up or would I continue serves with the Japanese navy

If Vladimir Lenin hadn't died of a stroke in 1974, how might the USSR have developed? Might it have been able to avoid Stalin's reign of terror? How might WWII have played out in this scenario? Lenin himself would have died by then, but a successor would inherit whatever situation Lenin left behind.

What would have to happen for a “Western Orthodox” church to gain enough popularity to compete with Catholicism and Protestantism, and what would be the impact on Western cultural and social development?

A timeline where Einstein led Israel, turned the Middle East toward solar energy and shared science, and prevented the wars, scandals, and invasions that scar our world today

In reality, on 16 November 1952, the Israeli government formally offered Albert Einstein the presidency of the State of Israel. Ambassador Abba Eban conveyed the request after the death of Chaim Weizmann, the country's first president. Einstein, seventy-three years old and living in Princeton, declined in a now-famous letter: he said he was "deeply moved by the offer" but also "saddened and ashamed" that he could not accept, lacking "the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with human beings." He chose solitary science and reflection. This story imagines what could have happened if, in a gesture of responsibility toward his people, he had said yes instead.

In the autumn of 1952 Albert Einstein received the letter from the Israeli embassy. For two days he kept it beside his pipe on the Princeton table, while mentally completing some variations of his unified field theory. Then he dictated to Helen Dukas a reply that stunned the world: “I accept. I come not as a party man but as a man of conscience. My people call, physics will wait.”

On 14 January 1953 the Knesset appointed him president. In his inaugural address, in hesitant Hebrew, he said: “Security will not come from cannons but from desalinated water, from captured sunlight, from bridges thrown toward those we now call enemies.” He immediately proposed the creation of a “Scientific Academy of the Near East” based in a neutral zone between West and East Jerusalem, financed by royalties on green technologies to be developed jointly.

Scientifically, the choice was realistic and far-sighted. Einstein knew the photovoltaic effect well, the work that won him the Nobel Prize. He encouraged a massive research programme on silicon cells, just as Bell Labs in the United States were perfecting the first commercial units. In 1955 the Academy inaugurated the first concentrating solar power plant in the Negev desert, capable of generating steam to desalinate seawater through the multi-stage flash distillation process, already known at the time. The yield was modest but sufficient to irrigate three thousand hectares, a miracle for the kibbutzim and the Palestinian villages that began to cooperate.

Einstein’s health became a turning point. In March 1955 a team from the newborn Hadassah Hospital, supported by American vascular surgeons, diagnosed an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Einstein agreed to an experimental resection and grafting with freeze-dried tissue, a technique in its infancy. He survived and became a living symbol: science in the service of life.

From that moment, his commitment became diplomatic. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, he threatened public resignation and spoke on the radio in Arabic and English, offering Nasser full sharing of water technologies in exchange for direct talks. The meeting in Cyprus, mediated by the United Nations, launched the Gedera process, named after the joint research centre where Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese and Israeli technicians perfected, by 1959, a reverse osmosis system with cellulose acetate membranes, refining patents that in our timeline would arrive only in the Sixties.

The Gedera model generated a virtuous circle. The availability of low-cost freshwater made collaborative agriculture more profitable than resource conflict. In 1963, with Einstein’s support, the Regional Authority for Water and Climate was created, a supranational technical body. Détente spread: governments reduced military spending and invested in research. The Academy attracted minds from all over the world and in 1965 patented a high-efficiency flat-plate solar collector that anticipated domestic solar thermal use by a decade.

Einstein passed away serenely on 18 April 1967, ten days after witnessing the signing of the Fundamental Treaty Israel Palestine. The agreement created two confederated states with Jerusalem as an open city under United Nations administration, a common energy market, and a scientific passport that allowed researchers to circulate freely. In our timeline, that same 1967 would have seen the Six-Day War, the beginning of the occupation, and decades of conflict.

President Einstein’s legacy accelerated concrete scientific developments. The Academy’s network of calculators, born to model water flows and solar irradiation, inspired in the early Seventies a packet-switching protocol that prefigured the Internet, parallel to ARPANET but with a cooperative soul. The know-how on magnetic confinement fusion, shared by Soviet, Israeli and Arab scientists, led in 1978 to a joint ITER-before-its-time project in the Wadi Rum desert, in Jordan. There, experiments with tokamak configurations improving superconducting materials achieved in 1985 the first stable plasma with net energy gain, anticipating our expectations by forty years.

The Cold War cooled without the Middle Eastern tinderbox. Nuclear disarmament was negotiated in Jerusalem in 1981, when the General Secretary of the CPSU, impressed by the progress of joint science, accepted mutual inspections and the demilitarisation of space. The Soviet Union reformed gradually, without collapsing, integrating into a global energy system based on the sun and green hydrogen.

It is here that we can measure the sharpest differences from the recent events of our reality. The Russian invasion of Ukraine of 2022, triggered in our world by the dispute over spheres of influence, never took place. In this timeline Ukraine, fuelled by solar technologies and scientific cooperation networks with Russia and Europe, became in the Nineties the “battery of Europe”, a neutral energy bridge. Crimea, never annexed, hosts a research centre on marine energies. The gas pipeline network was progressively dismantled in favour of high-voltage direct current transmission lines, developed precisely by a joint Spanish Israeli Russian programme.

The Epstein scandal is another revealer. In our world, Jeffrey Epstein’s network of sexual exploitation thrived on the opacity of financial and scientific elites, protected by a culture of silence. Here, the ethical revolution launched by Einstein, who imposed on the Academy extremely strict codes of conduct on personal behaviour and transparency, created an environment in which whistleblowers were protected by law. Already in 1996 an investigation by the International Scientific Council, born of the Gedera model, dismantled a child trafficking ring tied to an American financier, nipping in the bud any criminal career comparable to Epstein’s. Science remained a bastion of integrity.

The Palestinian question also took an opposite path. After the 1967 treaty, coexistence became normal. Gaza and the West Bank, integrated into the confederation, benefited from the solar and water boom. Refugee camps were dismantled by 1985 thanks to a programme of sustainable housing and technical training. The Palestinian leadership alternates with the Israeli one in the confederal presidency; today, in 2026, the president is Professor Leyla