What If............??

What If...? An alternative history of the world
What if the dinosaurs had survived? Or Hitler won in 1945? Or the aeroplane had been invented 1,000 years earlier? Would there even be life on earth if the moon had failed to form? Science fiction writer Stephen Baxter canvasses the possibilities

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article1222826.ece
Published: 31 August 2006

4.5 billion years ago: The Moon never formed

Life on Earth is very different; that is, if there's any life at all

The young Earth was wrapped in a blanket of cloud. Through a hierarchy of impacts, cloud particles gathered into whizzing asteroid-like bodies. The collisions were spectacular; Earth's final visitor was the size of Mars. Where the planets touched, a ring of fire formed, shattering the surface of both. Liquid rock gushed into space, and a glowing ring coalesced in orbit. Our Moon was born. Without it, and the gradual slowing of the tides, Earth's day would be about eight hours. The air would be rich in oxygen but laden with carbon dioxide. Given the fast rotation, there would be violent winds andno trees. Animals would need strength, armour, low profilesand would have fast metabolisms. The Moon stabilised Earth's rotation. Moonless Earth would have dramatic climate shifts - droughts, floods and ice ages.

65 million years ago: The dinosaur extinction does not happen

Earth is spared collision with asteroid

Sixty-five million years ago, the dinosaurs still ruled land and sea, as they had for more than 100 million years. Then a comet or asteroid struck our planet, wiping out 60 to 80 per cent of all species. Earth was unlucky to have been hit so late in its evolution. With no impact, the climate would have continued to evolve, species to rise and fall. Intelligence could have arisen, among birds or mammals, so they relied on brains rather than brute strength. One day, something similar to humans might have faced something like the dinosaurs. But we were hit and, although dinosaurs succumbed, some rat-like mammals dug themselves into the ash and survived.

476: Rome never falls

A Roman industrial revolution drives a unifying empire

Did Rome have to fall? After military defeats, the emperors tried to establish "natural boundaries", such as the Rhine and Hadrian's Wall, thus halting the empire's growth and economic development. They were technologically advanced and came close to the invention of steam engines. But such things were treated only as toys, and the chance of a Roman industrial revolutionwas lost.

If Rome had survived it might have fought off Islam where Byzantium failed, and handled the Mongols better than their medieval successors. In the Americas they wouldn't have practiced genocide as the British did, but assimilated, in the Roman way. In Europe, united in empire, there would be no feudalism, no chivalry - no parliaments - and no Great Britain.

875: Flight discovered 1,000 years early

Medieval Muslims use aircraft to conquer Europe

Just seven decades after the Prophet's death, Islamic armies swept across north Africa, and from 711AD conquered Spain. Abbas Qasim Ibn Firnas was a Cordoban scholar who, aged 70, built a flying machine. The old man glided off a mountain. His machine lacked a tail; he landed hard, hurting his back. But if he had succeeded, the Moors could have harnessed their edge in technology to wage war on western Europe. Rapid expansion would, most likely, have extinguished western Christendom. And in a Moorish London, blond Saxon children would have learned the revelation of Mohamed.

1348: The Black Death is averted

Lives are saved, but at what cost to freedom?

In the 14th century, the Black Death came out of the heart of Asia. It affected all of Europe within a few years. In cities such as London, half the population died. It was monstrous, but the plague had first appeared in Europe in Roman times, so populations had some resistance. In all, just (just!) a third of Europeans were killed by the Black Death. Compare that to 95 per cent of native North Americans killed during the European conquests by measles, smallpox and plague - diseases to which they had no prior exposure. But could the Black Death have been averted? Arabic doctors had an understanding of hygiene, for example, far in advance of western European medicine. What if the Death had been stopped or diluted?

In the emptied world after the Death, the feudal systems came under strain. Suddenly there were too few folk to do the work; a bad lord could not keep employees. Prices changed as the population drop meant there was more than enough food. There were revolts as the rulers tried to regain control. The relationship of rulers to ruled was transformed, and the slow opening-up of the medieval world began. Our modern freedoms came out of the vast charnel house that was the Black Death.

1441: Chinese explorers discover America

The New World is found, 50 years before Columbus

At the time of the 15th-century early Ming Dynasty, the Chinese - who led the world in printing, gunpowder and navigation - went exploring. A Muslim eunuch from the Yunnan Province, called Zheng He, assembled a great exploratory navy. The first westward expedition, seeking new trading relationships, set off in 1405 (15 years ahead of the first great Portuguese voyages of discovery). The Chinese vessels were "treasure ships", the biggest 400ft long and weighing 1,500 tons - decades ahead of anything in the west. His first expedition, which reached India, comprised 62 vessels carrying 28,000 men. In all, Zheng He made seven westward voyages, bringing home exotic novelties and striking terror and awe wherever he landed.

Zheng He could have beaten Columbus to the Americas but went home because of politics. The eunuch's voyages were seen as a threat by the Confucian scholars who ran the imperial bureaucracy. In 1436 the Confucians convinced the Emperor that China didn't need to deal with barbarian lands.

1945: Germany wins World War II

With their V2 rocket technology the Nazis are the first to conquer space

After Allied bombing, there isn't much left to see of Peenemünde, on Germany's Baltic coast. But this was the world's first rocket station. Here Wernher von Braun developed the V2 ballistic missile, which was the ancestor of both the US and Russian space programmes. And this place is the hinge of one of the most tantalising what-ifs of all. Hitler might have won the Second World War if Britain had settled for a truce after the fall of France in 1940, if he hadn't made the catastrophic decision to invade Russia or if the Nazis had developed an atomic bomb before America. This could have seen Peenemünde become a spaceport. By 1945, von Braun's plans were well developed - especially the A10 (in the Germans' jargon, the V2 was the A4). With a large first-stage booster and a winged V-2 mounted on top, it was comparable to the Atlas rocket that launched John Glenninto orbit in 1962. Von Braun led the Apollo programme which reached the Moon in 1969. With Nazi money the Germans might have got there earlier. They could have set up a lunar missile base for attacks against America, a plan floated by the US during the Cold War.

1962: The Cuban missile crisis blows up

World War III erupts; tens of millions die in Britain

In October 1962, the Cold War almost got very hot indeed. The Soviet Union was losing the arms race. The Russians had an overwhelming number of troops in central Europe but only 300 unreliable long-range missiles. The US had 5,000 nuclear weapons it could have deployed against Soviet targets. Premier Khrushchev saw that if he could plant bases for short-range missiles on the island of Cuba, where there was a friendly Communist government, he could even up the playing field at a stroke. Saturday 27 October, 'Black Saturday', was the most dangerous time of all. An American spy plane was shot down by the Cubans and the US Navy forced a Russian submarine to the surface.

Communications were poor and there was a danger of soldiers on the ground opening fire on their own initiative. World war was a gunshot away. What if that fateful trigger had been pulled? The bombs would have fallen on Sunday 28 October 1962, at 8am in Britain - 3am in Washington - the most difficult time to respond. The first targets would have been military. Civilian, economic and industrial targets - the cities - would have been next.By mid-November Britain would be dark and cold. Epidemics of cholera, typhoid and dysentery would hit. Reconstruction, rescue and corpse disposal would be attempted, with the workers paid in food. Looters would be shot. December would have seen the peak of deaths from radiation sickness. In all, between 17 and 38 million in Britain would die from the blast, the fallout or the cold. By 1967, between four and eight million people would have been scraping for survival.

1986: Nasa carries on to Mars

Nasa uses the Moon as a stepping stone to the Red Planet

The millions who watched Apollo 11's first lunar landing in 1969 had lived through an extraordinary expansion in spaceflight capabilities. We had no reason to believe it wasn't going to carry on. In 1969 Nasa put forward ambitious proposals for its post-Apollo future. The Space Shuttle would have been just one element, with a space station, lunar bases, nuclear rockets and expeditions to Mars in the 1980s to follow. Technically, it could have been done. But the Earth's only natural satellite was already a grave disappointment. If water had been found, the Moon would be a filling station outside Earth's savage gravity field. And in 1965 the first fly-by of Mars by Mariner 4 showed an arid, airless, cratered world. Suddenly, there was nowhere worth going. And the political will vanished. Nasa's crewed space programme came close to being shut down altogether. President Nixon allowed one element of it, the Space Shuttle, to survive - a bus with nowhere to go. Crewed missions to Mars would have brought benefits, through the necessary build-up of expertise in orbital assembly and long-duration missions.

You can read a full version of this feature in the Autumn issue of BBC Focus magazine, on sale today, priced £3.40