Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

[dcarson]

Mecca was under at least nominal Ottoman control then and there was already unrest. I can imagine both sides claiming that it was a sign that they were right.

[AlexanderHowl]

The Kaaba has been destroyed a few times and rebuilt, so it would probably be rebuilt by the victorious party.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The Kaaba has been destroyed a few times and rebuilt, so it would probably be rebuilt by the victorious party.

Possibly interesting is to have this be the same as the St Petersberg strike from Lucifer-5. That timeline would become Lucifer-5a and your new one is Lucifer-5b.

If Mecca is still closed to Westerners and rapidly rebuilt by the Ottomans you could end up with everyone in the next Haj getting radiation poisoning before the world figures out what's going on.

You might get pone new sect holding that "Faith without wisdom is but another name for folly." or something like that and embracing Western science and a culture of reason over blind faith and tradition.

However, you'll get multiple ones claiming Mecca was destroyed due to a lack of "purity" in mainstream believers and some new and much harsher interpretation of scripture is now necessary to avoid the wrath of Allah. It's generally easier for religion to go harder than softer.

Anyway, Lucifer 5b won't advance as fast as 5a did and probably not nearly as peacefully either.

[Astromancer]

Try this Lucifer world. A comet, latger than Tunguska, but not a civilization killer, hits this parallel's Earth in the mid-1930s. For seventy years ice age like conditions hold sway. The long struggle between Fascism, Communism, and Democracy, was put on ice, literally for a human lifetime. But the players have changed.

America became a social-democratic nation.

Japan is a comunist monarchy.

Germany moved to the left and became obcessed with eugenics. They no longer care about issues like Jewish ancestry, but if diabetes runs in your family and you try to have a child then you're sent to a camp.

I won't go into the rest now but it's basically a twisted WWII. Perhaps China, India, Iran, and Brazil, which became a major power during the "FROST," are fully engaged major players too.

It could be a three sided or two sided war. I'd need to work out the sides.

[AlexanderHowl]

Ice Age like conditions for seventy years would end civilization. You would have 20 meters of snow per year that never melted for locations above the 50th parallel north, below the 50th parallel south, and above 2000 meters in elevation, so you would lose most of Europe. In the rest of the world, crops would fail as the early frosts and the late thawing would prevent more than one crop a year (as well as shifting where plants can be grown by 2,000 kilometers to the south). Ninety-nine percent of the global population would starve and the remaining one percent would be tossed back to TL4.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Ice Age like conditions for seventy years would end civilization. You would have 20 meters of snow per year that never melted for locations above the 50th parallel north, below the 50th parallel south, and above 2000 meters in elevation, so you would lose most of Europe. In the rest of the world, crops would fail as the early frosts and the late thawing would prevent more than one crop a year (as well as shifting where plants can be grown by 2,000 kilometers to the south). Ninety-nine percent of the global population would starve and the remaining one percent would be tossed back to TL4.

Well then either limit how rotten the cold weather is or add somekind of supertech. The main idea is history, in this case the long war of the 1914 to 1990 period, gets stoped for a human lifetime and then, when the inhibiting factor is removed, history starts up again.

[PTTG]

I'm all on board. Does the tech remain the same, or is it TL-8 by the time of the thaw?

It does seem to me that we'd see way more socialism all around, even if it's a fairly cozy freeze, since the enclaves where people survive will by necessity be more enclosed.

That said, if you want to play with the dials a little bit, I could also see the enclaves becoming exaggerated forms of what went on before. Just like the Nazis becoming super-eugenicists, the Americans survived in super-capitalist cities where if you didn't make your rent, you were kicked out and froze to death by dawn. Maybe the British become radically monarchist or something.

Either way, an ice age would do it pretty well. The main thing it has to do is make flight and sea travel impossible, and long-distance travel extremely difficult.

If it's cold, but there's plenty of coal or some other bulky fuel, then I suppose that would work. So maybe it's not technically an ice age, just terrible winters every year and no real summer...

Throw in a source of food, but that's easy enough. Hydroponics? It sounds like a good background event. "Society nearly starved away entirely, but in one of the last great collaborative efforts, scientists at Stanford, working with Soviet researchers by radio, finally perfected the Losev Lamp, or "Freedom Bulb." It is that efficient light source which now illuminates greenhouses from Tokeo to Los Angelos, from Stalingrad to Cape Town."

This would mean that European resistance movements would have starved to death in the interem. But on the other hand the Nazis weren't exactly stable either, so we're already in a bit of a fantasy universe here.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by PTTG

I'm all on board. Does the tech remain the same, or is it TL-8 by the time of the thaw?

Either that or tech level 7+1. If we allow superscience elements, as in Lucifer-5, which can provide electricity for the cost of the wiring. Then society could advance technologically.

It does seem to me that we'd see way more socialism all around, even if it's a fairly cozy freeze, since the enclaves where people survive will by necessity be more enclosed.

Agreed. Also the need to work together to survive will teach the mindset that makes socialism logical.

That said, if you want to play with the dials a little bit, I could also see the enclaves becoming exaggerated forms of what went on before. Just like the Nazis becoming super-eugenicists, the Americans survived in super-capitalist cities where if you didn't make your rent, you were kicked out and froze to death by dawn. Maybe the British become radically monarchist or something.

As the New Deal was the main political movement going in the 1930's, the modern conservative movement is largely a post WWII thing, I see the USA as going social democratic. Without the cold war or a close alliance with Britain, which was mainly an alliance with the Tories, Labour and the British Left never seems to have really seen America as an ally, I don't see anything like America's present Conservative movement coming into being. And as there would be no oil shocks on this world, social democracy would stay the political cutting edge longer.

Britain, on the other hand, had already, during their mid-1920s slump, gone hard right to deal with hard times. They'd make sense as ultra-capitalists. The Japanese would be the radical monarchists.

Either way, an ice age would do it pretty well. The main thing it has to do is make flight and sea travel impossible, and long-distance travel extremely difficult.

That's the main idea. Separate the major powers for a lifetime, then, bring them back into contact...HARD!

If it's cold, but there's plenty of coal or some other bulky fuel, then I suppose that would work. So maybe it's not technically an ice age, just terrible winters every year and no real summer...

I assume, as I said above, superscience power generation and hydroponics. Outside it's miserable, people live in the cities. I see the cities as UltraModern and slightly Jetsons in the USA. Britain would have Everytowns. Continental Europe would go Futurist.

Throw in a source of food, but that's easy enough. Hydroponics? It sounds like a good background event. "Society nearly starved away entirely, but in one of the last great collaborative efforts, scientists at Stanford, working with Soviet researchers by radio, finally perfected the Losev Lamp, or "Freedom Bulb." It is that efficient light source which now illuminates greenhouses from Tokeo to Los Angelos, from Stalingrad to Cape Town."

I like how you think. Of course it would lead to the death of small towns and rural society. The wastelands between the cities would be an interesting place to adventure. A government anthropological ream during the great cold visiting the strange hyper-isolationist rural communities of the 1980's would be a lively adventure in and of itself.

This would mean that European resistance movements would have starved to death in the interem. But on the other hand the Nazis weren't exactly stable either, so we're already in a bit of a fantasy universe here.

The war began in 1939. I mean the comets to crash earlier so that the prewar world would be Frozen in place for seven decades. The resistance would come together after the war begins.

[PTTG]

Last one!

15: Millions of ablative-coated eggs rain down onto Earth, eventually hatching into apparently non-sapient five-fold symmetric sea creatures that proceeded to consume nearly all multicellular life in the oceans.

The life forms are either particularly hardy or else carefully engineered to be the ultimate invasive species. They eat everything made of hydrocarbons and are amphibious, scooching inland for a half-mile in search of more food.

When they attack a large animal, they release an ultrasonic call triggering a swarm attack. As merely animal threats, they force a substantial percentage of humanity to migrate inland, and worse, they anihillate all fish stocks, bringing human civilization to new food crisis as more than a billion people lose their critical food supply.

The alien's waste products also cause massive ocean plankton blooms, which ironically enough supercharge ocean carbon sequestration. It's enough to actually reverse global warming, for what it's worth.

The aliens were endemic within a year (there were hundreds of individuals hatched from each egg). After only eight years, most large sea animals were extinct, and all of humanity's attempts to exterminate the alien species were for naught. The global economic depression, food shortages, and mass migration away from the coast only stressed the population more.

Around 2020, the initial horror of the alien invasion that nobody quite invisioned has given way for resignation, but now the aliens seem to be evolving to live on land for longer.

16: All artifacts and chemical traces of humanity vanished instantly, leaving nothing but naked humans, some of them suddenly missing important parts. Those in tall buildings plummeted, those in underground facilities were fossilized. Domesticated plants and animals were not destroyed, but often redistributed or otherwise disrupted by the terrain reconfiguration.

Oh hey, idea, this is the place all the vanished people from #12 ended up in. It was a primeval world and then a bunch of people banestormed in, and some of them fell out of non-existent buildings. In that case, no domesticated animals would have made it, but that's actually cooler to me.

But yeah, this world has some serious problems. The places of cities are charnel pits, where countless people died shortly after arriving. A suprisingly small number of people died from falling, although a large number fell five or ten feet and broke an ankle. The initial "teleport kills" accounted for merely 5% of the population. It was fairly easy to build some sort of shelter, even in the most crowded areas, so few people died of exposure. But, by the second day those in regions with limited access to fresh water were starting to die off. Over the days that followed, people around the world struggled to assemble some kind of industrial base and to train people in survival skills before hunger kicked in, but for much of the world starvation loomed.

After the third week, there were essentially two kinds of surviving communities: greatly depleted ones that managed to hunt and gather enough to survive, and those that lived for a time on the dead.

With no fast travel available and no ready supply of food, no large-scale communication was possible for years. Nonetheless, military organizations persisted in a few places, leading to a number of independent militias and tribe-like organizations that would in time expand. Nonetheless, it was a dark time.

By 2020, most of the world was still chaotic, with barely-surviving hunter-gathers eeking out an existence, with the difference that purely cognitive technologies remained TL8. In some places, there even were communities that were climbing up the tech tree and had effectively TL 3 economically (minus domestication, which has only just begun from scratch), with TL8-style democracies. And not too far away are raider clans not at all unhappy with a return to "real life."

17: All macroscopic animals died.

Some species that have a microscopic life stage did survive, and colony animals such as jellyfish and sponges also survived for some reason. Walking here is unsettlingly quiet; there are no birds, no insects, nothing. The tardigrades are living it up, though. By 2020 plants have recolonized most of the world. Outtimers would do well to watch their dosimeters here; radiation hazards from fires and other accidents at nuclear sites has created a patchwork of unpredictable danger zones.

18: Intense neutron radiation caused many nuclear warheads to spontaneously detonate, and all reactors and most waste piles to melt down.

This world sucks. The radiation is often extremely localized. "Luckily" the nuclear explosions were cocentrated in silos and other isolated locations, leaving most of the world to merely deal with countless nuclear fires and fallout.

The radiation hazards are unpredictable, rather than uniform. A street may be only lightly hazardous but an alley just off it choked with deadly dust. The result was actually less migrant pressure than many other worlds -- for the most part there was nowhere to migrate to that was significantly better, unless one had the wealth and connections to move to a few particularly isolated enclaves, and even then it's better to live indoors.

By 2020, people are adapting to living life in sealed houses, to using dust masks and goggles at all times, to living shortened lives and hoping to move to a safer place, or at least clean up their home. Some of the most virulent radiation has decayed away, but it'll be centuries before much of the world is like it was before. And that's if the authorities manage to contain all of the blown-up waste sites.

On the bright side, there's no damn point in arguing against nuclear power now. What's it going to do, melt down? Compact fission reactors, often radiothermal in design, are a growing fad.

19: Nothing happened, despite desperate warnings. The wave simply passed by unnoticed except for a gentle planetwide aurora.

People here are marginally less respectful of astronomy, but
perhaps a little bit more interested in space photography. The
auroras were nice.

The big problem is that people here are generally dismissive of scientific threat assessments after the big hoopla about the "potentially deadly vega wave."

20: A huge number of objects were transformed into reality shards of all of the previous possibilities. Grasping the object transports the holder to the reality in question so long as the item is held. The only warning is that the object has a faint feeling of static repulsion.

About a thousand such shards were discovered in just the year following the event. It's slowed down a bit, but scientists have some idea how to detect them using some simple electrical tools, and are trying to get a handle on what they are. As far as they can tell, they really do teleport people to parallel worlds, but it also seems they're unstable, breaking down and teleporting back after about an hour of continuous use. More are gradually appearing.

Naturally Homeline is terrified, but the good news is that the researchers are on the wrong track, thinking that it's something to do with the wave alone. They seem to suspect that only 19 alternates exist, and the fact that they only work on human beings and their clothing, and two different worlds are almost instantly fatal to unprotected humans, make exploration extremely slow.

[PTTG]

Here's a scenario that alarmed Homeline rather severely.

A 1983 weird parallel was a minor curiosity, featuring a history was identical but sex-swapped. This included heavy inertia and alternate cultural structure, naturally. Homeline left it on its own but kept eyes on it for the sociocultural value of it. A three-person monitoring team stationed there kept reports going regularly.

Then, in 1988, all the men were replaced with their female equivalents. The two female members of the monitoring team reported that their comrade also vanished at the time.

This is all due to a population swap with a nearby echo of 1988 which now has the opposite problem.

One world is populated with men, and the other with women. And twelve billion people really confused people all together.

Homeline is conflicted with how to deal with it all. Oh, it's not a hell world -- not yet -- but neither worldline is likely to survive long-term. The all-women worldline might, I suppose. Still, it's going to be a real headache for Homeline to figure out if, let alone how, it should help.