chat

i would use my powers to make some of the Years of Rice and Salt stuff happen. ideally do the thing where the black plague kills 99.9% of europe and just see what happens. but since the book is written by a Materialist, he recognizes that other cultures from North Africa and Asia will just move in and do Imperialism eventually just in a delayed fashion. so maybe the delay will give an edge to the colonized peoples?

still might get that massive central Asian world war from the book but it's basically the biggest and only global war and long before nukes. but hey maybe you also get Communist Haudenosaunee superpower that helps everyone rebuild and the world transitions to socialism during the reconstruction

Not exactly sure how but I'd try to preserve knowledge from all over the world. If humanity was able to constantly knowledge instead of rediscovering everything every couple hundred years we'd have FALGSC by now.

Fossil fuel deposits are more evenly distributed and whatever hasn't been burnt by 2025 are rapidly less recoverable. Maybe zap those gas hydrates out of existence while we're at it.

It's really quite rude to give the hairless primates the tools of industrialisation and extinction in one hit.

Make central Australia a bit deeper, with a sea connection to the northern and southern coasts so the interior can stay forested.

Maybe have capitalism simultaneously start in India and China alongside Western Europe so we can see how much current timeline capitalism sucks because capitalism sucks in general and how much current timeline capitalism sucks because the Occidentals are an avaricious warlike tribal people with no regard for the sanctity of life.