Thinking About: Things that Might have Been

Imagine a world in which the Titanic didn’t sink. After missing or surviving the impact with the iceberg it arrives in New York harbour and the thousands of lives that might have been lost at sea continue to shape the world around them in uncountable ways. Or imagine something bigger. If Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not been assassinated in 1914 and the First World War had been avoided and, arguably at least, the Second World War had not followed on its heels how would the world look today after the millions of lives cut short in both wars continued on interacting in new ways with those around them. Is such a vision even possible? Could we know with any kind of accuracy, never mind certainty, of what might have happened if things had been different?

Two things got me thinking along these lines, firstly a book just out putting forward an idea of exactly what might have happened without the most catastrophic assassination in human history, the other is that I’m a few books away from a series of Alternate History books that are based on exactly such speculation but with the freedom of literature to imagin-eer as they will. Such speculation is naturally the fun part of this sort of thing but is that kind of knowledge really possible? Can we start from an incident, say the sinking of the Titanic or the assassination of the Archduke and predict, rather than imagine, what would come next? Honestly I think not. Think for a moment of how many interactions an average person has in a day of his/her life. Maybe hundreds if not thousands of words and actions that affect and effect the world around them. Most of these are vanishingly small and disappear in the background noise like ripples in a pool but occasionally a conversation or an action could change the world. In hindsight we might, given enough information, be able to pick out such incidents from the background but could you tell in advance? That’s just one person in one day. How about the interactions of a million people or a billion from all layers of society some with a great deal of power and influence and some with hardly any at all. Could you accurately pick out future trends and predict what will happen in 5, 10 or 50 years’ time based on what you know now? But I don’t think that it’s just about complexity. If it was all we would need is mountains of data and the computing power to handle it. Predicting the future isn’t, I content, like predicting the weather.

In order to move from an incident to an understanding of what will, and just as importantly won’t, come next we need something much more that data and the means to analyse it. We need something more than an understanding of human nature, sociology, culture, anthropology and even history itself – none of which, again I contend, we understand in anywhere near the detail we would need to for any meaningful predictions to take place. What we would need is a coherent conception of how everything hangs together – in effect we would require a Human Theory of Everything and we would need to be able to express it mathematically. If such a thing was achievable, which I don’t think it is in any conceivable timescale, we would be able to change the parameters of an equation, say adding or subtracting an assassination of a politically significant figure and show what the conclusions or the consequences would be. With that kind of knowledge, that kind of power at our fingertips, it’s difficult to know exactly what couldn’t be accomplished. We would know exactly how to act, or not act, to achieve any particular end. We would know in advance, possibly even years or decades in advance, what the world will be like and tweak the outcome by changing elements within the equations we know to work. If something unpredictable did happen then we could immediately see the consequences and act accordingly. Everything, and I do mean everything, would be under our control and that is one reason why I think such a tool is pure science-fiction. With the best will in the world such mathematics, even if we try to attain such clarity, will remain beyond us although we might finally, after many decades of struggle be able to predict with a fair degree of accuracy what the world will be like tomorrow or the day after, just like the weather report. Anything else is, I’m afraid pure fantasy.