There could be a multihundred faction cold war, depending on how things play out...
What if: Every country has a portal that leads to a different earth where they are a global superpower
- Thread starter MrtrappedInstory
- Start date
- Discussion What if?
Sinec OTL Earth seems to be a "hub world," I'd be more worried about an existential crisis on the other Earths about being less real than ours. Unless they also get portals in each of their countries following similar rules....
I think for fairness and symmetry the USA should get a portal to a world that's experiencing a similar scenario and where the USA balkanized shortly after the American Revolution and the present USA is just five or six of the original Thirteen Colonies. The OTL USA is that world's "what if this insignificant country was a huge superpower?" scenario.
This. In a lot of cases a "super-size" version of the country might have little in common with its OTL version and the "super-size" and OTL versions might not get along well. Russia's portal might be to a super-powerful Soviet Union that won the Cold War, Germany's portal might be to a super-powerful Germany that was on the winning side of WWI and is still ruled by a Kaiser, Macedonia's portal might be to a version of Alexander's empire that managed to last where most people worship Zeus and Isis, Turkey might get a portal to a successful super-powerful Ottoman Empire, Israel might get a portal to some alternate world that diverged from ours thousands of years ago, as you said the Vatican portal might be to some Catholic theocratic empire, etc..
I don't think that's necessarily likely. What @ScottishMongol said, and also as I said above, the "super-size" countries aren't necessarily going to have a culture that people from their OTL versions would feel at home in.
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aen_the_acolyte
Aen
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I guess South Africa's portal could be a Draka-dominated world
- Location
- Brazil
- Pronouns
- He
You know .... germany portal would be spicy
its kaiserreich or angry mustache man
so a lot of countries would just straight up rush them
(also Italy one would be cool , would that mean a super roman empire ? )
its kaiserreich or angry mustache man
so a lot of countries would just straight up rush them
(also Italy one would be cool , would that mean a super roman empire ? )
if i'm thinking right then the "tech-trees" of each alt world might be pretty different from ours right as in investments may have been made in different stuff hell one world might have learned about graphene far earlier than us for all we know if even some worlds are willing to trade even basic tech then it would be a major change to the status qwo industries might be obsolete in an instant if a alt world ends up having a better alternative . That's not to say that any industry will die overnight but I imagine most would choose to use SSDs over hard drives if it was possible to make and use even if some help from a alt world was required
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- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
Wales is a country. It's not a nationstate, but it's a country. A constituent country.
THE ONCE AND FUTURE KIIIINGGGG
THE ONCE AND FUTURE KIIIINGGGG
Or an alternate United States, or the capitol province of the New Dutch Commonwealth, or part of the Southern Mali Empire. Or Whatifalthist's Drakia. Or canon! Drakia. I like this idea better without alien space bats, though.
I'm just amused to imagine the kind of shenanigans that must have gone on to turn the Principality of Sealand into a global superpower.
Or it might get a portal to a huge Zulu empire or something. It kind of depends on how you define "South Africa."
Really, you probably get that issue with a lot of countries that were basically created as a convenience for colonial powers, or started as settler colonies, etc.. E.g. a superpower DRC is either going to need a PoD within the last 140 years or so or it's going to be a state set up by some group that just happened to live in what OTL became the Belgian Congo and then the DRC.
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It probably depends how similar it has to be to the original on our Earth in order to count as the "same" country? Also, on a related note, how far back is the point of divergence allowed to be? Because I think that say, some Hellenic-descended superpower in the Mediterranean and Southwestern Asia would be so divergent from Macedonia today in culture, language, even demographics, etc.., that it might strain the spirit of the OP a bit. You would naively expect a country going through "its portal" to at least be able to hold a conversation with their super-powered equivalent, and I feel that naïve expectation has to carry a lot of weight weight in a good-faith reading of the scenario.
So as always with these sort of threads, the crucial question is what kind of genie is enforcing this wish, how exactly they are interpreting it, and how much of a stickler for detail they are, and in what ways.
Assuming that the superpowered versions of countries have to be at least vaguely recognisable to their IRL counterparts, then I think there are a few options. In an infinite number of universes, there probably is some timeline which could lead to San Marino becoming a global superpower. It does not have to be plausible, or probable, just technically physically possible. (Some confluence of international banking and a much more rigid system of international diplomacy and condottieri contracts starting in the Renaissance, say.) A lot of the timelines which could lead to such things, however, would probably be weird, potentially deeply weird.
Depending on what PoD cut-off is allowed in time, then the most probable universes might actually not work just by different history, but perhaps even humanity having taken a different turn sometime early in our history on Earth. (A slightly more bonobo-like humanity, for example, might allow a lot of different possibilities in international politics than our more warlike offshoot.) If allowed, then these "strange humanity" timelines could probabilistically outnumber the "strange history" ones, especially for small nations where any historical sequence of events leaving them as a superpower is likely to be incredibly improbable.
The boring answer, of course, would just be to invoke nuclear war for the smaller nations, and have them be relatively intact survivors of a large nuclear exchange at some point in the 20th century, and thereby be superpowers in the future world. As I recall, Poul Andersson even had this happen with Sweden in Tau Zero. I can't make a great mental estimate of whether these universes would be more probable than ones where humanity was somehow different, but they probably are.
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
My County and Barony of Sealand will actually be more than just a meme.
- Location
- America
Maybe it be a world where the Christian church declared science heresy the way bible thumpers do so and Muslims however embraced the original alliance between learning and theology, resulting in them being a Cold War era tech level where everyone else is world war 2?
- Location
- Brazil
- Pronouns
- He
A really weird one would be south Africa , they can have everything from the super Zulu empire to Draka on their potential
Vatican City: leads to the Papal League, a de facto confederacy of Catholic countries with a central economic union (akin to the EU) covering a third of th eglobe
Monaco: The Grimaldi dynasty inherited the throne of th eFrench Empire
Israel: less successful Jewish revolt, leading to no Jewish diaspora. Israel inherited the entire Arabian Peninsula, giving them access to the Ghuwar oil field.
Monaco: The Grimaldi dynasty inherited the throne of th eFrench Empire
Israel: less successful Jewish revolt, leading to no Jewish diaspora. Israel inherited the entire Arabian Peninsula, giving them access to the Ghuwar oil field.