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Comment by atomi | Hacker News Reader

It does and I feel the example is just as contrived.

The writer seems to imply that Fritz Haber would not have developed the Haber process without Liebig and effectively without the Mt Tambora eruption.

Nice theory, but I don't know if we can be sure of all that.

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And even if that were true, Haber and Bosch were not the only nitrogen chemists and chemical engineers working near the state of the art.

The processes might have different names attached, but we'd still have them.

It probably would get invented eventually, but the timing would be different, throwing off whatever predictions you might try to make.

This sort of thing is a good argument against the idea of anything like Asimov's psychohistory really working in a general sort of way. There are too many random contingencies, and they don't average out.

We have no idea when the next pandemic might be, or who will win the next presidential election, or what new things will be invented. Some preparations can be made, but they have to pretty multi-purpose.

I think a counter-factual is an invention that came along many years after all the precursors were present. And would have been in demand / successful / useful much earlier.

Are there any examples of that? Wheeled suitcases is sometimes cited, even if it is a slightly less profound advancement than the ammonia/nitrogen process.

There's no apparent reason why supermarkets or other self service stores weren't invented until the 20th century. The precursor to railways, the Diolkos in 600 BC, was not developed into wooden mining railways for another 2000 years.

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