See, some people do alt history to genuinely find an interesting new take on historical divergence points, some use it to play out their weird geopolitical fantasies. Me? I throw a big rock at the planet and then delight in putting the pieces back together, can’t recommend the “throw a big rock at it” method enough.
tired, boring, played out, done to death: but what if the Nazis had won the war?
exciting, fresh, abjectly insane, affects more than half of the common era: but what if Charlemagne had decided against ultimogeniture and not split his european conquests between his sons?
hell, let's take it a step further: what if the roman empire just never fuckin' happened. the entire cultural fundament of the modern day west, just fwoosh gone. christianity remained its own little thing out in the middle east, the roman republic never grew beyond its initial borders, just yet another city state of the same kind you had oodles of in greece. no migration period, though the vikings would probably have still done their thing and made their largely unsuccessful ventures to north america.
how would that even play out over two thousand years later
YEAH LIKE- at that point, you have so many points of divergence, so much that changes, so much that just doesn't HAPPEN, that you're left with a completely unrecognizable world from the one we know! It's stuff like that where, if you're a student of history, you can get REALLY deep in the weeds on, it's so much fun to chew on!!
Let’s go back even farther. Like literally formation of the solar system farther.
Literally everything on earth is the same.
…but Venus isn’t an acid bathed hellfire world, but a humid and hot yet still earthlike world. Maybe it’s orbit is just a little farther out. It might not even have any tool using animals like humans, but does have plants and animals with their own approximately carbon based biology.
The space race starts advancing massively faster because now there is so much more land to settle and America can’t let Venus be taken by the USSR become a redder planet than mars can it? Te American empire needs to extend to the Venusian frontier.
This is definitely not nice and utopian, Venus is hostile to human life in the way a jungle can be, but it still has all those easy surface deposits of precious metals, minerals, gold and other valuable materials that were scrapped clean from earth centuries ago so the costs of going there are very worth it to expansionist colonial empires.
And of course idiot libertarians want to Moon is a Harsh mistress themselves a ‘truly free frontier’ and the results are successful but naturally horrifying to anyone who, y’know, hates the idea of indentured servitude.
All kinds of misery and intrigue on an alien world that isn’t far enough away to escape problems on on Earth.
