New Reality Seeds

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by johndallman

There are a few things needed for this to work. One is an Egyptian navy in the Indian Ocean. The canal makes this possible, by providing a low-cost transport route to bases in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, but that navy is still going to be expensive.

Affording that navy requires having lots of trade for it to protect. If Egypt can make a deal with the Caliphate to protect ships to the west coast of Arabia, and thus the Hajj traffic to Mecca and Medina, that's a significant source of income.

I like your thinking. We could have England, that sought friendship with the Persians to balance against the Turks, offer aid in shipbuilding. Maybe the Dutch, fierce competitors help too. Some pirates would turn Egyptian rather than Turk. It also brings in new links to European technology and science until the Egyptians are ready to join in on their own.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Apollonian

I like that. Imagine the European advisors that would have made their way into Egypt in the 1820s, not to mention the Egyptian advisors that might have headed toward Europe to help build, say, the Kiel canal a few decades early.

Solid thinking.

Hm. Where would Egypt get coal to power an industrial revolution and the navy it'll need in the late 19th century?

For industrialization, think solar. Solar power machines were demonstrated in Paris in the 1780s. Given how much bright sunlight Egypt has, early industrialization could go solar. The removal of fuel costs would balance other problems.

Maybe instead of getting their own, they're dependent on trade, and there's a thriving trade of Egyptian cotton and grain to the Germanies and the United Kingdom in exchange for coal. Looking for an alternative, Egyptian natural philosophers are quicker to develop oil power than in our timeline, and a strong Egypt can easily dominate the Arabian peninsula... well, more easily than European powers.

A coal trade makes sense, as does an early focus on oil if they dominate Arabia.

Hydropower on the Nile is also a thing, but it might not be follow the same path as in our timeline; without a post-colonial period to catch up to Europe, maybe the influences are different.

It would be different than in Europe. But the USA was distinctively different too.

Prior to the 19th century, the canal becomes an immediate target for any nation that wants to maintain naval power in both the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. That's pretty much just the Ottomans, so maybe the split between the Ottomans and Egypt happens sooner (war of liberation) or later (wiser or luckier Sultans). Perhaps it never happens - but that's against the premise.

I assume the Turks have a limited rule over Egypt, much like they had in Tunis or other Barbary coast states.

For another thing, you could have the Napoleonic French occupation of Egypt happen more-or-less on schedule; the Egyptian resistance to this and eventual success in driving Napoleon out without major European or Turkish interference is what unites the modern Egyptian state. Having the canal there gives the French (and British!) a real strategic reason to go for Egypt as well, instead of Napoleon's political maneuvering. Present-day scholars might consider the Occupation as the pivotal moment in Egypt's recent history, sort of like the Russo-Japanese War.

The French will be chased out by the Brits. Getting the Brits out, now that IS A PROBLEM!!!

Edit to add:
Huh. According to Wikipedia, the Mamluks actually fought the Portuguese in the early 16th century as a direct response to Portuguese depredations in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps the Ottomans prop up the Mamluks as allies instead of conquering them as they did in our timeline, and the canal is a partial result of that relationship. Either way, a strong maritime power that can stand up to the Portuguese means the history of the Indian Ocean is going to look very different from our timeline.

The changes might be subtle in the early 16th century and build up later.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Curmudgeon

Egypt is going to run into trouble. The British, French and Portuguese have already established themselves on the coasts of sub-Saharan Africa, Capetown is still the big important permanent settlement and Cecil Rhodes has been in South Africa for four years. All the existing colonial powers have staked out their spheres of influence. The French and British have been expanding inland since about 1840, both to suppress the slave trade and to locate new economic opportunities.

Beyond this Egypt has two more hurdles to southward expansion. The first is that they will need to get through tse-tse fly country without expanding the fly's range. They especially don't want a population of tse-tse flies in Egypt. The other problem is up and coming in 1881 with the rise of The Mahdi. While he is famously remembered for besieging the Egyptian garrison under General Gordon at Khartoum 1884-1885 and its subsequent massacre, he defeated three Egyptian armies (one of them led by a British general) in 1883.

While it would require greater military investment, I would think that Egypt would more likely push its railways westward across North Africa. That would bring it into conflict with the Ottomans (Libya and Tunisia), the French (the rest of north Africa bordering the Mediterranean), and if they reach Spanish Sahara (Western Sahara), the Spanish. Of course, that would also depend on whether they want actual possession of the lands or just trading opportunities.

The Egyptians would be moving south before any of the others you mention move inland. The far bigger problem would be Usman dan Fodio.

[AlexanderHowl]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Democritus-1: In this setting, it is far more difficult to "split the atom". As a result background radiation is slightly lower, but there were no noticeable historical changes until the 19th century when nobody discovered x-rays and radium was just a newly discovered dense element (atomic decay was discovered in the 1950s, but no practical uses for it have been developed). Things mostly continued on track until World War II when of course there was never a Manhattan Project. Japan still surrendered as the United States began to invade. But now it's the 1980s and World War III has broken out with fierce fighting in Europe and the Middle East and the cities of North America and Russia being protected with laser antiaircraft weapons against bombers with nerve gas.

That suggests a world with much stronger nuclear forces, which means stars don't function. You could have a similar stagnation by having Einstein die in infancy though. Without Einstein's work, it may have taken another 20 years to figure out relativity, and it would have probably been piecemeal. In addition, Einstein was a celebrity scientist who inspired a generation of physicists, so you might have lost a lot of potential physicists to accounting.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

That suggests a world with much stronger nuclear forces, which means stars don't function.

...it's not like this would be the only IW setting where stuff that works in one world won't work in another. Take as read that in this world fission is hard but fusion isn't.

[AlexanderHowl]

Most elements heavier than iron are created by decay chains, so they are products of fission after fusion. It would be a weird parallel rather than a new reality.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Most elements heavier than iron are created by decay chains, so they are products of fission after fusion. It would be a weird parallel rather than a new reality.

Fission still happens. Just slow enough that you can't achieve critical mass.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

For industrialization, think solar. Solar power machines were demonstrated in Paris in the 1780s. Given how much bright sunlight Egypt has, early industrialization could go solar. The removal of fuel costs would balance other problems.

Solar is a crummy energy source for industrialization, it's just too diffuse. Much more likely are hydropower (the early industrial revolution used that in both England and the US, and the parts of Egypt people actually *live* in are close to rivers), and oil or oil shale (which Egypt has, mostly between the Nile and the Red Sea, which is after all where you're in the process of making the important part of the country with those canal projects). They could also expand just a little for either Arabian or Gulf Oil, or the coal reserves of northern Somalia.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Fission still happens. Just slow enough that you can't achieve critical mass.

Slowing the rate doesn't prevent critical masses, it just raises the total amount of material you need for one. And it doesn't particularly help for the stars either, given that the p-p chain 1 reaction involves a beryllium-6 nucleus fissioning into helium-4 and 2 protons.

You're probably better off simply saying there is something different about the stability of really heavy nuclei, say anything heavier than lead-208, without specifying too much what it is. Yeah, maybe somebody could still build *some* sort of fission device, but as long as you take uranium, plutonium and thorium out of the picture, it's going to stay theoretical (or at best be limited to a handful of expensive reactor projects on the scale of say major particle accelerators) rather than generate much useful technology. Oh, and incidentally x-rays have nothing to do with fusion, they're discovered in experiments on electrical effects in low pressure gases.

Edit: One side effect there is there may be quite a bit more of these heavy elements present in the environment - which means virtually anything transported off this timeline may suddenly become significantly radioactive when taken somewhere they *aren't* stable. And its possible there may be stuff that uses them in practical applications that are impossible elsewhere - astatine for example is probably a semiconductor, but we aren't sure because it's most stable isotope has an 8 hour half-life and there's probably never been a microgram of it in one place to test. If it's stable, well, it's an analog of iodine, maybe here you can recover it in bulk from natural gas well brines.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Solar is a crummy energy source for industrialization, it's just too diffuse. Much more likely are hydropower (the early industrial revolution used that in both England and the US, and the parts of Egypt people actually *live* in are close to rivers), and oil or oil shale (which Egypt has, mostly between the Nile and the Red Sea, which is after all where you're in the process of making the important part of the country with those canal projects). They could also expand just a little for either Arabian or Gulf Oil, or the coal reserves of northern Somalia.

Still, Egypt has lots of intense bright sunlight. As I said, machines run by solar power were demonstrated in Paris in the 1780s. Several early economists including David Ricardo assume that, after the coal is all used up, humanity will use solar power. Ricardo even claimed to have seen solar powered machines in England and thought they'd be most practical in "...Egypt or California."

Solar power was well understood and assumed to be the future in the early industrial period.