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"For Want of a Nail" consequence streams (and webs)

I dug a good one about JFK assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald was hired by the Texas book depository, and he had many co-workers (that were blissfully unaware of what was to happen). On the day of the assassination Oswald went to seven floor and shot Kennedy from there around One in the afternoon. His co-workers initially wanted to eat their sandwich together at the seven floor (!) but finally split in three groups.
One group went downstairs, at the base of the building.
A second group went to sixth floor and heard Oswald above their heads.
Two other guys: one left late and crossed path with Oswald... and his concealed gun. Another actually forgot his jacket on seven floor and also crossed path with Oswald. Both missed, of course, a meeting with Fate or Destiny or History.

Now imagine if the co-workers stuck with their initial plan and "invaded" seven floor, stumbling on Oswald just as he prepared to shot Kennedy. Oh boy, the mayhem.
 
Here's the French variant of the Corbyn story that opened the thread.

Fast forward to August 27, 2014. Arnaud Montebourg, who is a flamboyant personality, is at a political meeting in Burgundy, the land of good wines. Having drunk a little too much wine, he is even more flamboyant (if not borderline crazy) than usual, which says a lot.
He was François Hollande currently Minister for "redressement productif" a very pompous name for a super minister of the industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnaud_Montebourg
Montebourg, unable to bite his tongue, made a kamikaze charge against Hollande, and was fired.

Meanwhile, François Hollande former Deputy Secretary General had low morale. He had quit the job some weeks earlier. He felt he might return to teaching, or banking, or go to the United States. His name ? Emmanuel Macron... and all of sudden come the phone call. Montebourg was fired. Interested by his job ? The answer was positive.

Only two years later. Exact same day - late August 2016. Macron, having learned a lot during those years, is now unstoppable. Nine more months, and he is President.

So, had Montebourg not got drunk at that Burgundy wine fest, and blasted Hollande, committing a political seppuku, Macron would not be President.

It also works with François Fillon scandal. It was a perfect shitstorm, but had it happened a little earlier or a little later, it could have been derailed. It really stroke at the worse of time (hint: tu quoque, fili ! It was probably NOT a coincidence. This is no conspiracy theory: as much as I hate Fillon, he was stabbed in the back in a perfect political crime).

In fact France probably dodged a major bullet during that election. Without Macron (who surely, has it flaws, but still) we could have had a Fillon - Le Pen - Melenchon bloodbath. Great God. I would have left France, really. Hail Spain !
 
Also: 2001, Contact and Interstellar are strongly linked. Arthur Clarke knew Carl Sagan pretty well. Sagan had a friend called Linda Obst. Obst worked on both Contact and Interstellar, many years apart. Also Kip (KIPP) Thorne.
Obst was at the root of Contact, the novel that Sagan started writting in 1979 and published in 1985. She also worked on the movie, in 1997. At the same time, come early draft of Interstellar, and she was involved in that.
 
Arthur Clarke sequel to 2001, 2010, was written after the Pioneer and Voyager flybys in the late 70's provided high resolution pictures of Jupiter and Saturn moons.
The third book in the series (which become 2061, Odyssey three) was to be similar - waiting for Galileo, the Jupiter orbiter, to get even more pictures.
Galileo was to be launched in January 1982 and reach Jupiter in 1986. The troubled Space Shuttle decided otherwise, and it was not launched before 1989, arriving at Jupiter in December 1995. With a ruined antenna, just as in the novel.
Because Galileo was so late, one bright engineer at JPL - Gentry Lee - found himself bored. So was Clarke on the other side of the planet, in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Thanks to a movie producer, the two met in 1986 and wrote, not a sequel to 2010, but a sequel to Rama, then more sequels, which were not really good.
Meanwhile 2061, per lack of 1986 Galileo Jupiter orbiter, turned to Comet Halley, which made a close encounter with Earth that year.

So, had they been no Shuttle
- Galileo would have launched in time, with a solid antenna, on a Titan IIIE clasic rocket
- Gentry Lee would have been busy at JPL (good for him, he was not a very good writer, even with Clarke help)
- Clarke would have quietly written 2010 with Galileo in mind, and 2061 would have either never existed or not been stuck on comet Halley.
 
Callan said:
During the 2001 election, Jack Straw (in his capacity as Home Secretary) gave a rather poorly-received speech to the Police Federation. He was repeatedly heckled and booed, and because it was the middle of an election he could not be joined or defended by any senior police officers onstage. Straw recounted in his memoirs that on the train back to London he was despondent, expecting the headlines to be dominated by his disastrous speech, police unions briefing against him and maybe even Number 10 throwing him under the bus. Then one of his aides got off the phone, laughing, and told him: "it's okay, no-one's going to care about the speech. John Prescott just punched a voter."

Suppose when Prescott got egged that day, he doesn't rise to the bait and keeps walking. A day or two of negative coverage about the Home Secretary is unlikely to sway the election either way. But considering how unexpected Straw's appointment to the Foreign Office was (the man himself expected to get demoted), his briefly becoming a electoral liability could easily butterfly his promotion. And if Cook remains Foreign Secretary (or someone less able than either of them takes the job), the push to invade Iraq could very easily get a lot trickier.

At his lowest moments in the 2003-04 period, could Blair survive the resignation of a Foreign Secretary- either due to Cook's principles or another candidate's incompetence? And Blair going at the height of that conflict gives a lot less legitimacy to Bush's decisions going into the 2004 election, and drastically changes the course of both New Labour and the Labour party.

For want of a punch.
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you could call the timeline 'Wallop, Bang, Crash' as you go from the POD in 2001, to the Iraq War in 2003-04 and then on to the economic crisis of the late 00s
 
Another one about Galileo. In 1994 comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke into 9 pieces that slammed into Jupiter with terrific violence. This is the reason why, 4 years later, two movies about asteroids were made: the equally forgettable Deep Impact and Armaggeddon. Deep Impact was once to be a remake of When world collides by Steven Spielberg, and then it becomes... that movie. :cautious:

Now the Galileo probe entered orbit around Jupiter in December 1995, 18 months too late. The impacts were observed from Earth, and by Galileo itself which was 10 millions of km of Jupiter.

And they were no small fireworks, even at the scale of Jupiter.
According to Wikipedia

The first impact occurred at 20:13 UTC on July 16, 1994, when fragment A of the nucleus entered Jupiter's southern hemisphere at a speed of about 60 km/s (35 mi/s).[4] Instruments on Galileo detected a fireball that reached a peak temperature of about 24,000 K (23,700 °C; 42,700 °F), compared to the typical Jovian cloudtop temperature of about 130 K (−143 °C; −226 °F), before expanding and cooling rapidly to about 1,500 K (1,230 °C; 2,240 °F) after 40 seconds. The plume from the fireball quickly reached a height of over 3,000 km (1,900 mi).[19]
A few minutes after the impact fireball was detected, Galileo measured renewed heating, probably due to ejected material falling back onto the planet. Earth-based observers detected the fireball rising over the limb of the planet shortly after the initial impact

Over the next six days, 21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km (7,500 mi) across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal).[23] Two impacts 12 hours apart on July 19 created impact marks of similar size to that caused by fragment G, and impacts continued until July 22, when fragment W struck the planet.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker–Levy_9#cite_note-24
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker–Levy_9#cite_note-24

Now imagine if the Shuttle had not blown up, or never existed, and Galileo had been already in orbit around Jupiter when the comet slammed. What a show it would have been. :eek:

Same for Red planet and Mission to Mars: they stemmed from Sojourner and Pathfinder landing in 1997. It takes two to four years for a Hollywood script to mature into a movie.
 
Archibald said:
Now imagine if the Shuttle had not blown up, or never existed, and Galileo had been already in orbit around Jupiter when the comet slammed. What a show it would have been. :eek:
Click to expand...

So quite possibly some dramatic photos and then a dead probe?
 
In 1977 Spielberg directed Close encounters of the third kind. Then, quite inevitably, talk about a sequel began. that was four years before E.T (1982) and the project was called Night Skies. There the aliens were to be malevolent and spread terror among a peaceful farmer family.

Spielberg ultimately turned against the concept, and the benevolent E.T was the result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Skies

Yet the "malevolent" part went to Poltergeist and finally, to Gremlins, since Tobbe Hooper, Joe Dante and Spielberg knew each others pretty well.

What is really amazing is that, at some point after E.T, Spielberg very nearly directed 2010, Odyssey two, since he and Kubrick had a long standing relationship which final result was A.I, two decades later.
 
Alex Richards said:
I may be assuming too much in the way of local orbital disturbance.
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This is Jupiter we're talking about. I suspect a small planet could crash into it and it wouldn't notice. Or do you mean cometary fragments might more directly affect Galileo?

Archibald said:
In 1977 Spielberg directed Close encounters of the third kind. Then, quite inevitably, talk about a sequel began. that was four years before E.T (1982) and the project was called Night Skies. There the aliens were to be malevolent and spread terror among a peaceful farmer family.
Click to expand...
It seems bizarre to me that they would think (even briefly) that a logical way to follow on from the tone of Close Encounters would be to make the aliens hostile.

That seems as incongruous as that Mirror Universe episode of Star Trek Enterprise where the Vulcans land and Cochrane shoots them.
 
Seemed bizarre to me, too, and I know that Wikipedia not's that reliable, but I dug out other sources and the story seems to be true...

Other coincidences: Kubrick The shining, and The empire strike back aparently used the same sets, in England. In fact planet Hoth snow where Luke nearly freeze to death, actually froze Jack Nicholson character do death. Same artificial snow. How about that ?

"Here's Chewiiiiie" bwaaaaaaheeeew (Chewbacca blast the door and put his face in the hole) :ROFLMAO:

And then come Raiders of the lost Ark, same place, and that's the moment when Kubrick met Spielberg, starting a friendship that resulted in A.I many years later.
Talk about a string of coincidences. Imagine all the potential whatifs there.
 
Archibald said:
Thanks to a movie producer, the two met in 1986 and wrote, not a sequel to 2010, but a sequel to Rama, then more sequels, which were not really good.
Click to expand...

I must admit I actually really enjoyed those books, some fantastic ideas and concepts in there. I actually reread them a couple of years ago and found my sympathies on the Octospiders completely changed from when I first read them as a kid. A bit of a change of tone from the original Rama to be sure.

And you've got a whole bunch of these connections don't you! How do you pick up on this stuff?
 
Wikipedia and - most importantly - Imdb "trivia" entries. They are packed full with such coincidences. The Internet Movie Data Base is one hell of resource.
I'm a die hard-fan of the space program and, by extension, of the movies that deal with it - hard sci-fi or soft sci-fi.
When you start digging into that through Imdb, there are some amazing connections that are just mind blowing.

First time I red Wikipedia entry about Ian Fleming Moonraker, my mind was blown. Nuclear V-2 ? in 1954 ? where are the Space Shuttles that lift-off from the 747, their engines running on fairy dust (since there is no freakkin' external tank !) ?

Let's talk about Pussy Galore. Not a fan of Bond, nor borne in the english-speaking world, I did not knew about that character. First time I heard about the name, it was in an astronaut biography. He was invited to the CIA HQ after a shuttle launch, and joked to his commander "I wonder if we gonna meet Pussy Galore ?" Since the biography is packed full with somophoric, explicit language, I thought he talked about a porn star.
Then I learned it was the name of a James Bond girl, and finally come to understand the joke. It just blew my mind, the utter sexism in the name. This did not escaped Mike Myers, by the way, whose Austin Powers met a girl with the name of Alotta Fagina, a direct refence to Galore. :LOL::ROFLMAO::LOL::ROFLMAO::LOL::ROFLMAO::LOL::ROFLMAO:
 
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Archibald said:
Wikipedia and - most importantly - Imdb "trivia" entries. They are packed full with such coincidences. The Internet Movie Data Base is one hell of resource.
I'm a die hard-fan of the space program and, by extension, of the movies that deal with it - hard sci-fi or soft sci-fi.
When you start digging into that through Imdb, there are some amazing connections that are just mind blowing.

First time I red Wikipedia entry about Ian Fleming Moonraker, my mind was blown. Nuclear V-2 ? in 1954 ? where are the Space Shuttles that lift-off from the 747, their engines running on fairy dust (since there is no freakkin' external tank !) ?
Click to expand...
Well I mean, as all Bond novels were written in the 1950s or the very early 1960s, they couldn't really feature things like that...as we discuss a fair bit on the Bond thread, the books are rather different to the films in tone.

The Moonraker novel is interesting because it is mad in different ways to how the film is mad.
 
In memory of Steve Ditko - he was always an artistic guy and a comics fan, but it was being a student at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School which helped him break into the industry at the time he did. He chose to go there because he learned Jerry Robinson was teaching there. if he doesn't do that and breaks into the industry another way at another time, he's not going to be at Atlas at the time Stan Lee's looking for a Spider-Man artist.

Spider-Man ends up a wildly different character (more like Kirby's earlier Fly), if produced at all. No Dr Strange, no Blue Beetle revamp, no Question, no Creeper, and no Speedball. Some other company and comic gets Ditko's amazing trippy art and mind.

No Dr Strange at Marvel, no pilgrimage of hippies to see the clearly-acid-tripping fellow travellers at Marvel - people who'll go on to create Eclipse Comics. If the loss of Strange leads to no Eclipse Comics, that means no Marvelman reprints in the US (and thus it's never completed); no Rocketeer, no Zot!, a whole load of creators not getting their first breaks (or at least going elsewhere).
 
one chance in billions. Jupiter is huge, Galileo is small, space is unlimited. Although with the Murphy law, you never know...
 
How about this one, which shows you how early PODs can affect current things:

1) in 1767, a new theatre was planned for the Comédie-Française. From 1779-1782 it was built in Paris, and called the Odéon after a Frenchified version of the Greek word for theatre. Despite this, the Comédie-Française didn't actually move in in the end.

2) In 1866, with US coinage having been depleted by the US Civil War, Congress issued a new five-cent coin. Because of the influence of the nickel magnate Joseph Wharton on Congress, this coin ended up being made of nickel, and nicknamed 'a nickel'.

3) In 1888, Col. William Austin opens a dime museum (an exhibition for the working classes) in Boston, MA. Rather than charging a dime, he charges a nickel, so (inspired by the name of the French theatre, which has been copied in Anglophone countries) he calls it a nickelodeon.

4) Somewhat more logically, in 1905, Harry Davis and John P. Harris open one of the earliest silent-film cinemas in Pittsburgh, PA, and decide to reuse Austin's name as it is a theatre for which they are charging a nickel. The name 'nickelodeon' is quickly popularised throughout the United States for cheap cinemas.

5) Nickelodeons were popular into the 1910s but then died out as a business model. However, the name therefore came to be evocative of that early period of American cinema. In 1976, a film was made by Peter Bogdanovich set in this era (based on true stories of silent cinema) under the title Nickelodeon.

6) In 1979 WCC launched the satellite/cable channel Nickelodeon in the United States (based on a system set up in 1977). Given the closeness of the dates, I suspect the film is how they heard of the name.

7) In the 1990s Nickelodeon became popular enough as children's TV in both the United States and elsewhere to basically define the childhoods of a generation, and its name immediately evokes a particular era.


All because of decisions taken in 1767 in Paris and 1866 in Washington.
 
Thande: this is amazing ! I never quite understood the bizarre name of that peculiar TV channel. Thank you for filling that gap in my knowledge.

Had Eugene Poubelle been born with a different name, a dust bin or trash heap would not be called a poubelle in French. Of course that caused endless trouble and hassle for his heirs.
Same for Gustave Eiffel, although it is far more glorious to bear the name of an iconic landmark rather than a trash can :unsure:
 
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